Structuring News Articles and Opinions for Developing an e-Participation Web Platform

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a system that aims at supporting citizen participation in ongoing debates by gathering and openly publishing news and opinions. For citizens who are unaware of the current issues faced by their local community, it becomes helpful to link those issues to related background events as well as relevant opinions. To fulfill this goal, we extract events from news articles and append links among opinions, articles, and events. Furthermore, the linked data is published for supporting concern assessment and discussion between citizens.