(I'm a little new to THOMAS so maybe there is a way to access more of
this information without painful and difficult scraping through HTML
pages that I haven't found. And of course, the Senate data is much
worse.)
Eric Fredricksen
On Oct 25, 11:30 am, "John Wonderlich" <johnwonderl...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Nope... (Except of course through GovTrack.)
To respond to John's question-- I think the House XML vote files are
actually pretty good, and could be a model for the Senate, and committee
votes. They refer to related bills and amendments in a reliable way and
identify MoCs by their Bioguide ID. It's a pleasure to use that data. A
DTD or something would be helpful for some of the fields, but it's
really not something I would even say was worth worrying about. Finding
new votes is easy to get from screen-scraping the votes pages on the
House site, so this isn't even all that important either from my
perspective, though an RSS feed for instance would certainly be a useful
thing for the public in general.
I hope they don't change too much!
--
- Josh Tauberer
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1041/vote_104_1_00225.xml
We asked about these files and were told they were tested but would
not be deployed at large, which seems rather a shame.
Derek
I think that was in the report that I posted a link to, quoting Derek.
> I wonder if a switch to XML in the Senate would need to be attached to
> an appropriations bill, or if a few sentences attached to something else
> would be sufficient.
I got the impression from some digging around a year ago that it might
even only take a decision from Senate Administration (whatever that
means). I don't think it's in Senate rules that the Senate website
cannot use structured data, for instance.
Josh is correct. The Secretary of the Senate oversees senate.gov, and
the secretary is selected by the Senate majority via its leader (in
this case, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada). Now, I suppose they could put a
rule into effect, but Senate rules being mostly procedural in nature,
I don't see that happening. Basically, it would take the will of the
majority as expressed through the Secretary of the Senate to do this.
That also means that a decision to publish structured data could be
reversed by another majority.
Derek
If someone would like to write up a couple of paragraphs with what the "ask" is (and brief background on why we're asking) I'd be happy to pass the ask on to friends who work for members on the Senate Rules and Administration committee.
On 10/28/07, Derek Willis < dwi...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Oct 28, 7:47 pm, Josh Tauberer <taube...@govtrack.us> wrote:
> > I wonder if a switch to XML in the Senate would need to be attached to
> > an appropriations bill, or if a few sentences attached to something else
> > would be sufficient.
>
> I got the impression from some digging around a year ago that it might
> even only take a decision from Senate Administration (whatever that
> means). I don't think it's in Senate rules that the Senate website
> cannot use structured data, for instance.
Josh is correct. The Secretary of the Senate oversees senate.gov , and
the secretary is selected by the Senate majority via its leader (in
this case, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada). Now, I suppose they could put a
rule into effect, but Senate rules being mostly procedural in nature,
I don't see that happening. Basically, it would take the will of the
majority as expressed through the Secretary of the Senate to do this.
That also means that a decision to publish structured data could be
reversed by another majority.
Derek