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unitedstates / wish-list

A wish list for this organization, open an Issue to discuss what we can add. Derived from a News Foo session.
https://github.com/unitedstates/wish-list/issues
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Graph database of information regarding legislation, legislators, anything i can get my hands on #19

Open karabijavad opened 10 years ago

karabijavad commented 10 years ago

I've begun working on a script to import all kinds of data regarding legislation into a graph database (neo4j specifically).

it is located at: http://github.com/karabijavad/congress-graph

i could go into detail over why this is interesting, but i may just let neo4j speak for themselves: http://www.neotechnology.com/neo4j-graph-database/

anyway, the aim of this project is to have all these 'entities' (legislators, congresses, bills, ammendments, states, districts... any sort of noun, really) and their 'relationships' (lives_in, member_of, sponsored, cosponsored, shot_down, any sort of verb, etc) stored in a database in which the database allows for extremely fast relationship traversing. The DSL of neo4j (cypher) also allows for patterns to be expressed in a way suitable for graph data.

For a simple example, check out the readme: https://github.com/karabijavad/congress-graph/blob/master/README.md

I think this project (specifically, just bringing legislation data over to a graph data) could be revolutionary, especially when it comes to anyone trying to query this type of data for any sort of pattern (eg: "Give me all the legislators who represent district x, of party y, who also received funds from lobbyist z").

Anyway, I thought this was something unitedstates would be interested in, and I would really love any input on how i can best get any interesting data. If anyone has any suggests for types of data to include into the graph, please let me know, and i will be happy to include it. Thank you

akuckartz commented 9 years ago

I am interested in this issue as far as it involves JSON-LD or RDF.

karabijavad commented 9 years ago

@akuckartz thats the cool thing about neo4j! the json objects (the nodes) are in fact linked by first class relationships

so you can query the data using json like syntax to express what youre looking for, and also express relationships in the query (with cypher)