Google; average age of politician and average age of elected officials, nowt really. politicians “average age”, some, but nothing meta.
Wolfram|Alpha; average age of elected officials and politicians age, nada. politicians, more but nothing that close.
DBpedia; lookup.dbpedia.org only works for single terms. I’m assuming there is some form of method to grep and display some part or levels of this query from the graph. The Wikipedia infoboxes DBpedia use (the info in the box) have DOBs and “In office” start/end dates roles.
Freebase is just ugh, wut these days.
Powerset; Sounds interesting;
“The Semantic Web promises to revolutionize access to information by adding machine-readable semantic information to content which is normally interpretable only by people. In addition, it will also revolutionize access to services by adding semantic information to create machine-readable service descriptions. This ambitious vision has been slow to take off because of a chicken and egg problem. Markup is required before people will build applications, applications are required before it is worth the hard work of doing markup. Natural language processing (NLP) has advanced to the point where it can break the impasse and open up the possibilities of the Semantic Web. First, NLP systems can now automatically create annotations from unstructured text. This provides the data that semantic web applications require. Second, NLP systems are themselves consumers of semantic web information and thus provide economic motivation for people to create and maintain such information. For example, a new generation of natural language search systems, as illustrated by Powerset, can take advantage of semantic web markup and ontologies to augment their interpretation of underlying textual content. They can also expose semantic web services directly in response to natural language queries.” link
(’42:35 - Ecosystem acceleration’ - “who in The Forest is the volunteer co-ordinator?”. Well, as Drupal [7] is going semantic…)
but a general search gives a big fail atm. Sentence matching gives handy results like “The average age of senators in 2007 was 62 years.
- Members of the 111th United States Congress” which you can dive into with the arrow button, but the Wikipedia article states [citation needed] for that info.
P.S.
“While 70 per cent of India’s population is below 40 years of age, 80 per cent of India’s politicians are over 70 years.” link
“The research is to develop, in conjunction with an existing community of researchers, a software environment for carrying out experimental research in corpus linguistics, with a particular emphasis on parsed text corpora. Corpora are collections of (transcribed) spoken and written passages, annotated in a number of different ways. A parsed corpus is one where the grammatical structure of each sentence is included. As corpora grow in size and complexity (typical parsed corpora are around the 1 million word mark), corpus linguistics research becomes increasingly dependent on computer software support. ” link
BBC Radio 4: Today programme: “Is the language politicians and policy makers use clear or confusing? The Public Administration Committee is today holding a public hearing on how the government uses, and misuses, language. Matthew Parris, Times columnist and former MP, and linguistics expert Professor David Crystal discuss the evidence they will give to the committee.” link, mp3
Crossposted from my blog. | 
anxious