The Open House Project » xml http://www.theopenhouseproject.com Recommendations, Resources, and Reform Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:24:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Watch the revisions to the bail-out bill http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/10/01/watch-the-revisions-to-the-bail-out-bill/ http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/10/01/watch-the-revisions-to-the-bail-out-bill/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:12:18 +0000 Joshua Tauberer http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/?p=425 Following John’s note on an OHP mail list email, I adapted the bill comparison tool I developed for GovTrack and used it to analyze the changes made between the draft PDFs that have been circulating of the economic bail-out bill that is now a large package of legislation. I found five drafts, going back to Thursday, September 25 and the latest one from the Senate today. You can see the successive changes from draft to draft here.

It’s not very pretty because while bill writers have been posting the PDFs, PDFs don’t make it easy to make comparisons. The bill writers are composing the bills in XML, and if they made those available we the public would have an easier time. Maybe we wouldn’t complain to our reps so much either because we could actually understand what is going on better!

]]> http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/10/01/watch-the-revisions-to-the-bail-out-bill/feed/ 0 Technology Notes, February 12th http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/02/12/technology-notes-february-12th/ http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/02/12/technology-notes-february-12th/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:44:22 +0000 John Wonderlich http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/02/12/technology-notes-february-12th/ Reuters introduced a new entity extraction tool called Calais, which, through an API or web-based submission form, takes text and recognizes entities, outputting an RDF file of recognized entities, complete with URIs.  I wonder if entity extraction will become like spellchecking, widely available and free.  I also wonder if tools that use semantic structured data will adapt in order to take advantage of what will likely become redundant extraction tools, sort of like running redundant ocr, but for semantic elements.  Could multiple extraction tools also lead to a sort of consensus-building around markup languages, where entity extraction tools legitimize certain modes of reference by virtue of reliably recognizing them, in perhaps the same way search engines normalize hypertext links?

Next: I happened across Twiddla.com yesterday, which is a free sharable web-based whiteboard that lets you doodle on or annotate web-pages with others in a chat room.  Highly amusing, and probably useful too.  I seem to remember something like this coming out a year ago–a tool that added chat to every webpage, but I don’t remember what it’s called, and haven’t seen it since.  Guess it wasn’t that successful.

I’ve also been making myself familiar with the work or dataportability.org, promoting open standards for data sharing.  I especially like OPML for its simplicity and usefullness (I’ll be sharing a big OPML file here soon), and hope that APML includes an element for sharing one’s OPML along with your other social information.

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