SKOS Concepts and Concept Schemes
Example terms are "city council", "committee", "finance committee", "subcommittee", "mayor | mayoress", councillor", "chairman | chairwoman" (and/or "chairperson"), "alderman | alderwoman" (and/or "alderperson"), "parliamentary caucus", "political party", "motion", "bill", "amendment" etc.
At the moment we are mostly active regarding English, French and German terms. But other languages also are most welcome. It is work in progress.
The quality of the terms and translations is more important than a large number of them.
The thesaurus will be implemented using the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)(http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/).
Elementary relations between terms (eg "finance committee" is a narrower term than "committee") will also be encoded.
The intention is to host the thesaurus below the namespace "http://www.w3.org/ns/opengov" - pending an agreement with the W3C.
The thesaurus can then be used together with vocabularies such as Popolo or OpenGovLD.
Let us know if you have questions or suggestions or would like to contribute to this effort.
Please also let us know about similar initiatives we might not yet be aware of. EuroVoc (http://eurovoc.europa.eu/) unfortunately does not contain many of those terms which are relevant for municipalities.