A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to get in touch with three people at the Library of Congress, including the LOC’s director of web services (if I’m getting the title right), who took some time to talk to me about the information flow in the LOC that gets legislative information into the website [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Structured Data'
Leg. database: Some progress
July 10th, 2007 · No Comments
Tags: OpenHouse · RSS · Structured Data
Legislative XML: What we have and what we’re seeking
July 4th, 2007 · 1 Comment
John asked me to clarify a bit what legislative information exists in XML and what more would be a good idea for Congress to provide (this is the subject of the first chapter of our report, Legislative Databases).
What exists now, publicly, is an XML markup of the text of some legislation. First the counts, and [...]
Tags: OpenHouse · Structured Data
Committee Feeds: Some Recommendations
March 16th, 2007 · No Comments
When creating an RSS feed, one should have two audiences in mind: first is your human readers that will be subscribing with their news readers, second are the computers that will be mixing your feed with others, and transforming your feed into other formats (iCal feeds, integrating it into a website, etc.) For committees in [...]
Tags: Congress · OpenHouse · Structured Data
States are leading the way with downloadable legislative databases
February 22nd, 2007 · 4 Comments
I’ve blogged here before (1, 2) about how publishing raw, structured data that can be processed by computers can have unpredictable benefits, and I feel strongly that Congress should provide a raw database download of the status of all legislation. (They have the database already; it’s what powers THOMAS.) I didn’t realize, though, that [...]
Tags: OpenHouse · Structured Data
Mash-ups for government transparency
January 25th, 2007 · 6 Comments
A few years ago I launched GovTrack.us. I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but these days you might call it a mash-up of data about the U.S. Congress. At the time what I was thinking was just collecting information about Congress from various sources (THOMAS, the Senate website, and the House [...]
Tags: OpenHouse · Structured Data
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