Since November 2010, Team POPONG has went through a variety of discussions and experiments.
Inspired by GovTrack’s periodical reports, we now plan to share our day-by-day lessons. We hope they would benefit other toddler teams that are imagining their own services.

Politician Dictionary

  • Dropped usage of MongoDB, and migrated to SQLAlchemy+PostgreSQL.
    • Detailed backgrounds shall be posted in the future.

  • Created portable widgets for a politician’s timeline and related people.

    <script src="http://popong.com/widgets/relation.js?person_id=195224" type="text/javascript"></script>
  • Exposed politicians’ Chinese names along with the Korean names.
  • Added birthyear page (ex: Politicians born in 1953).
  • Modified the browser title, so that the more importation information came first.
    • POPONG Politician Dictionary - Chin Seon-mi
      -> Chin Seon-mi (Minjut-Onghap Party) :: POPONG Politician Dictionary
  • Started accumulating visiting logs.

Data

  • Collected all datasets dispersed among the whole filesystem into a single Git repository.
    • Documented known sources for every dataset.
  • Imported Twitter, Facebook addresses of politicians
  • Built a glossary of terms containing Korean meanings, English translations, and aliases.
  • Built a mapping between Hanja(Chinese)-Hangul(Korean) for transliterations.
    • Both for Korean last names and for general use.
  • Wrote a PDF-parsing library in Jython.
    • However, produces errors and does not yet work perfectly.
    • ex: “대안” → “눀안”
  • Crawled the number of Google search results of each politician in order to digitize the politician’s popularity.
    • ex: “About 24,900,000 results (0.13 seconds)”
    • However, this approach was deprecated.
    • Alternatives exists: Twitter search index or co-authorships of bills.
  • Gathered and preprocessed South Korean map data.

Misc

  • Created Developers Page.

  • Added link alternates.

  • Applied i18n so that all pages are also available in English: .

  • Switched from Apache2 to Nginx.
  • Standardized file naming convention.
    • Only Roman letters.
    • Lower-case everywhere.
    • Underscores(_) between words.
  • Participated in OKFnKorea’s Open Data Day Conference, and organized 19th Assembly members’ property data.