DiscourseDB:About
Welcome to Discourse DB.
Discourse DB is a new kind of site: a database that uses the power and ease-of-use of wiki technology to collect the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues. Finally, there is a true "opinion roundup" - a single destination where anyone can go to see the nature of the debate on any political issue, whether current or historic. And editing the data, or adding new data, is free, easy and open to the public.
You can find out information like:
- How many and which commentators are talking about a specific topic, like the Darfur conflict
- The nature of the commentary on either side of a debate, like whether the United States should attack Iran
- A listing of all commentary on the site written by a specific person, like Paul Krugman or Rich Lowry
- A listing of all the commentary on the site published in a specific publication, like The Washington Post
Discourse DB attempts to serve as a true "opinion roundup" - a single destination where anyone can go to see the nature of the debate on any political issue, whether current or historic. And editing the data, or adding new data, is free, easy and open to the public.
The site is also a queriable database, with an export of its data (in RDF format) available for querying by outside systems. For an illustration of this capability, see the Discourse DB analysis page.
Discourse DB is powered by MediaWiki, along with the MediaWiki extension Semantic MediaWiki and many of its spinoff extensions; see here for the complete list. Discourse DB is closely affiliated with Semantic MediaWiki extension, and it was used as the original testing ground for many of these extensions (though not SMW itself).
Discourse DB was created by Nick Grandy and Yaron Koren, and is currently run by Yaron Koren. It was first released to the public in September 2006. You can reach Yaron at yaron57@gmail.com.
You can read more, including what Discourse DB is not, and general help for the entire site.