Existing Resources

One of the break-out groups at the end of Saturday as part of WorkshopNotes.

URLs

...to existing resources

• http://govtrack.us/
• http://xml.house.gov/
• http://sunlightfoundation.com (WARNING: home page (even blog post permalinks) loads VERY slowly and may lockup your browser for 30 seconds of more with spinning rainbow beachball or whatever your system has. Safari 2.0.4/OSX 10.4.9 / iBook G4 1.33 GHz / 1.5GB RAM).
• http://thomas.loc.gov
  • e.g. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc110/ found from http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:1:./temp/~c110vOacb0::

...to Connect-The-Dot-like Ideas

• http://der-mo.net/relationbrowser
• http://www.xigi.net -->person and organization map (Kevin is here)
• http://www.wikimindmap.org [try: http://www.wikimindmap.org/viewmap.php?wiki=en.wikipedia.org&topic=legislation&Submit=Search]
• http://sunlightlabs.com/visualizingearmarks/ --> A number of different earmark tools
• http://www.theyrule.net/ -- > Visualization of Corp. Board Members

Notes

Rough notes taken by TantekÇelik 2007-08-11.

Legislation and how it gets to the internet in all forms

It gets introduced to a committee.

then to the Library

House Library is pretty good

they convert it to XML format

they give it to Thomas in the XML and HTML formats

unfortunately the Senate hasn't done it yet.

Every paragraph has a permalink

xml.house.gov shows you all the schemas

When you look up something that becomes a house bill, you can choose to download it in XML format or HTML or PDF.

The XML will break it down in all of the language that you are used to seeing.

Two problems:

1. Data is hidden in XML silos (hard for more people to see, understand, re-use)

2. The data you want is not available.

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