Ontology-based roles association networks for visualizing trends in political debate

Abstract

Online resources, large data repositories and streaming social network messages embed plenitudes of interesting knowledge, often of associative nature. A specific communicative context, such as the political debate in a given country, has groupings of actors, with changing attitudes and stances towards each other and external, real or invented, threats and opportunities. A new form of associative network is introduced, that integrate flexible ontologies for complex contexts of roles and hierarchies with a labelled association structure representing observed strengths and attitudes. Twitter messages from the political landscape in Denmark up to the general election 2015 are used as a both current and relevant illustrative case.