But– keep in mind that when aggregating, an event that shows up in the calendar as “Subcommittee on Health” is confusing if you don’t know which committee it belongs too.

Bioguide IDs are unique IDs assigned to people, incl. all MoC’s (incl. since 1786 or whatever), members of the continental congress, etc. Unfortunately, multiple IDs are assigned to the same individual on rare occasion (possibly just historical records of women who changed their name after marriage).

For witnesses, I think it would be asking for quite a lot for committee website admins to come up with URIs for arbitrary people. I’d suggest just dropping URIs for them.

1) The organizer element is the place I would look for information about which committee or subcommittee is holding the hearing. The example feed is bad because it references the subcommittee in the title element and the committee in the organizer element. I’ll get that changed in version 2. One thing we’ve discussed internally is whether a subcommittee meeting needs to reference the committee to which it belongs. I’m under the opinion that, given the context, a meeting of the subcommittee does not need a reference to the parent because the feed is used to syndicate event information, not House organizational structure.

2) The one saving grace of the attendee tags is that it requires a URI instead of a URL. I really like the idea of using the bioguide IDs for members of congress. Rather than using mailto:member@house.gov we could use gov.house:bioguide:110:0001. Are the bioguide IDs unique across sessions? Witnesses are more difficult. While email addresses would be a great option, it would be more realistic to use a custom URI such as gov.house:schedule:committee:20070711:001 with an arbitrary ID per witness. The ability to identify a witness across hearings would be lost, but if that’s the best that can be done…

3) I’ll take a look at the House XML markup. Thanks!

Jeremy

Three suggestions–

First, “who” is having the meeting is not explicitly represented. The title field of the event gives the name of the subcommittee, but which committee’s subcommittee is it? And what would the tag look like if it were a full committee meeting? (The title of the feed as a whole includes the name of the committee, but you’d have to hack around with the content of that tag to extract just the name of the committee — the name should be in a separate tag.)

I’m not sure how attendee tags should be used, since not everyone will have a public email address or any other obvious identifier. But for members of congress, an existing identifier system should be co-opted if one is going to be used at all, such as bioguide IDs.

Lastly, it would be great to also include tags to represent what bills are relevant to the meeting. The xml.house.gov work may have something useful to co-opt to refer to bills, or if not something that, for instance, follow GovTrack’s naming conventions for bills.