The committee section of the Open House Project report made several specific suggestions about how to make information from congressional committees more publicly accessible and useful. One of the basic steps we recommended was to use RSS feeds to announce committee meetings. We have created a template for announcing committee hearings with structured data. (This is an xml file, if you’d like to see what it looks like, check out below.)

RSS feeds of committee events enable several things to happen very easily. Standardizing the way committees announce their public events will allow the events to be aggregated. This means we may soon be able to set up a calendar, widget, or website that lists all upcoming congressional committee hearings. Structured formats also make information far more useful: easily imported, sorted, even combined with other data sources. The information is more useful because the elements within the document are given an identity and therefore gain semantic value. You can arrange events by date, search for speakers, or browse titles, since structured information makes the identity of those things clear within the document.

My thinking has been the following: if you can set up a calendar from a data set made available by a professional sports team, why not from Congress?

One of the reasons that it hasn’t happened yet is that it takes coordination and specialized knowledge to create a standard. If a standard isn’t broadly accepted, then its worth is diminished, so this is the sort of thing that is best done well the first time. That’s where the sunlight labs comes in. Here’s Jeremy Carbaugh’s post on the sunlight labs blog, where he goes into more detail about what they used to create this XML sample.

Based on John Wonderlich’s work on the Open House Project and Joshua Ruihley’s work on Open Hearings, we here in the Labs decided to write a ‘dream feed’ as an example of an RSS format congress could use to syndicate their committee meeting schedule…

The feed was written to the RSS 2.0.9 spec. Since RSS is meant for syndication, two additional modules, elements belonging to a namespace, were used to add the information that was needed. The xCal XML specification was used to add event data to the feed. xCal is an XML representation of the widely used iCalendar format. The format is fairly straighforward except for the organizer and attendee elements. The specification requires the value of these elements to be a URI rather than a string naming the individual. The URI can be any identifier, but is typically the email address of the individual. To include the name of the individual, a cn attribute must be added to the tag. Additionally, the attendee element has a role attribute that describes the role in which the attendee will be serving. We’ve added a custom X-WITNESS role to identify witnesses that are testifying before a committee.

They’re looking for feedback, so your advice will be welcomed.

Finally, I’d like to post the actual code, so you can see what they’ve been working on. Please, let us know what you think.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0"
    xmlns:xcal="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcal"
    xmlns:enc=" http://www.solitude.dk/syndication/enclosures/">
  <channel>
    <title>House Committee Schedule</title>
    <link>http://house.gov/schedule/</link>
    <description>Master schedule for house committees.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:39:21 EDT</lastBuildDate>
    <docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-2-0-9</docs>
    <generator>House Schedule Generator 1.0</generator>
    <webMaster>schedule@house.gov&lt ;/webMaster>
    <ttl>3600</ttl>
    <item>
      <title>Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management</title>
      <link>http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/schedule.html</link>
      <description>To review trading of energy-based derivatives.</description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:39:21 EDT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings#200707121000</guid>
      <category domain="http://house.gov/schedule/type">hearing</category>
      <category domain=" http://house.gov/schedule/visibility">public</category>
      <xcal:organizer cn="House Committee on Agriculture">http://agriculture.house.gov</xcal:organizer>
      <xcal:location>1300 Longworth House Office Building, Washington, DC</xcal:location>
      <xcal:dtstart>2007-07-12T10:00:00Z</xcal:dtstart>
      <xcal:dtend>2007-07-12T11:00:00Z</xcal:dtend>
      <xcal:attendee role="CHAIRMAN" cn="Rep. John Doe">mailto:john.doe@house.gov</xcal:attendee>
      <xcal:attendee role="OPT-PARTICIPANT" cn="Rep. Joe Smith">mailto: joe.smith@house.gov</xcal:attendee>
      <xcal:attendee role="X-WITNESS" cn="Dan Johnson">mailto:djohnson@company.com</xcal:attendee>
      <enc:enclosure title="Live Media">
        <enc:link type="video/quicktime" length="11534336"
          url="http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/200707121000.mov " />
        <enc:link type="audio/mpeg" length="11534336"
          url="http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/200707121000.mp3 " />
      </enc:enclosure>
      <enc:enclosure title="Archived Media">
        <enc:link type="video/quicktime" length="11534336"
          url="http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/archive/200707121000.mov" />
        <enc:link type="audio/mpeg" length="11534336"
          url="http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/archive/200707121000.mp3" />
      </enc:enclosure>
      <enc:enclosure title="Agenda">
        <enc:link type="application/pdf" length="11534"
          url=" http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/200707121000_agenda.pdf" />
      </enc:enclosure>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>