3 V. Belák V. Svátek* 2010 Supporting Self-Organization in Politics by the Semantic Web Technologies Proceedings of the Second International conference on eParticipation (ePart 2010), Lausanne, Switzerland <p>We present a use of knowledge technologies in support of self-organization of people with joint political goals. We argue for the use of the semantic web technologies to enhance interoperability between eParticipation systems and to provide better user experience. We claim that ontology-supported eParticipation may increase the impact of eParticipation projects to public policy, because it enables better linkage of users and sharing of knowledge across different systems. In order to enable these scenarios, we built a core eParticipation ontology in RDF/OWL. The suitability of this approach is preliminarily demonstrated in a design and implementation of a proof-of-concept social-semantic web application Ontopolis.net. It is wholly backed by the ontology and thus demonstrates the possible openness of such an approach. This system leverages various knowledge technologies and resources like WordNet thesaurus in order to provide an intelligent recommendation of content or users. Hence it is designed to help people establish groups centred around joint goals and interests, which may subsequently lead to an emergence of public initiatives and joint actions.</p>

* Non-Clique Member, Supported by CSF project no. P202/10/0761, “Web Semantization”. Dr. Conor Hayes and Dr. Vassilios Peristeras provided valuable comments and suggestions.

 http://nb.vse.cz/~svatek/ePart10-final.pdf