The current e-petition website only classifies petitions according to two criteria:
For the purposes of this website, I wanted to extend that to make petitions searchable and browsable by more categories. The additions I have made are:
The original version of the government e-petitions website published stats by postcode district for petitions with over 1,000 signatures. The new version replaces that with a count per constituency for all petitions. As the postcode states are now only of historic interest, they are no longer shown on the site.
The "Diversity Rating" and "Local Issue Rating" are attempts to give a measurement of how geographically dispersed signatories are to a petition. A higher Diversity Rating means that signatures are more widely spread, while a higher Local Issue Rating indicates petitions that have a lot of concentrated support in a smaller number of constituencies.
The ratings are calculated as a Gini coefficient, which is a widely used measurement of inequality. For the purpose of this site, the Diversity rating is an inverse Gini, whereby the higher the number the more equal the distribution is, while the Local Issue rating uses a standard Gini whereby the higher the number the more unequal the distribution.
The Diversity Rating is not the direct opposite of the Local Issue Rating - that is, a petition with a Diversity Rating of 60% will not necessarily have a Local Issue Rating of 50%, and vice versea. That's because the two ratings are calculated slightly differently.
Tags are automatically extracted by software, looking for commonly recurring keywords. Words are stemmed (using the Porter Stemming Algorithm) before being matched, so related words will match the same tag. For example, "digital", "digitally" and "digitise" will all be tagged with "Digital".
Because the tagging is automated, it may generate tags that are not directly related to the subject of the petition. The tagging system is being refined in the light of experience, so it isn't necessarily a fixed list.
The content of the government e-petitions website is © Crown Copyright. The terms and conditions of the site permit re-use on other websites, providing the source and copyright are acknowledged. This website complies with those conditions.
Because this site isn't funded by the government, or an educational establishment, or a charity, or a large corporation, and I still have hosting costs to pay.
3.235.42.157 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:36:42 +0000