publication

Linked open data approach to study the assembly minutes of international organizations and their underlying prosopography in the real world context

Authors:
Pierre-Etienne Bourneuf
Davide Rodogno
Grégoire Mallard
Eero HYVöNEN
Petri LESKINEN
Alexandre LIONNET
Blandine BLUKACZ-LOUISFERT
Florian CAFIERO
2026
The notion of democracy and the functions of the state of the law in modern liberal countries are based on legislation and agreements that are discussed and decided in democratically elected national parliaments. In an analogous way, various international organizations have been established to discuss and agree upon international matters, such as state of the law principles, war and peace, climate change, global health issues, and food and agriculture. Examples of such international organizations include the Parliament of EU, United Nations (UN), Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), World Health Organization (WHO), Red Cross, and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to name a few. This paper presents a Linked Open Data (LOD) approach for publishing and studying assembly minutes data of international organizations, based on lessons learned in developing analogous systems for parliamentary discussion minutes. As a case study, minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (LoN) (1920–1946) are considered. A new system League of Nations Sampo is presented, reusing the ParliamentSampo framework for the speeches and prosopography of the Parliament of Finland (1907–). League of Nations Sampo is based 27,000 pages of minutes of LoN assembly meetings, a prosopographical knowledge graph about some 3,100 people mentioned in the minutes, and on contextualizing data about the real world.