Updating policy

[Thomas Bruce]

Folks:

I've got questions about updating and status of the bills that appear in Deepbills.  They may either be naive or stupid, given that I haven't done much research before posting.  I note that the bill status is shown at the top of the bill in the XML.  

a) What are the possible stages that can appear in that element, and what is their sequence?

b) What is the updating policy?

Basically, I'm trying to figure out what the best practice for updating data extracted from the bills would actually be, given the possibility of multiple successive versions.   And how are you handling annoying things like parallel committee drafts?

t.

[Don Whiteside]

I think the status you're talking about is the one we assign for our internal workflow, and for API purposes the only type you'll ever see is "complete."

For example:

<revision size="3952" annotations="0" status="complete" id="5" commit-time="2013-11-18T22:03:31Z" 

The only thing that's likely meaningful to you there is the commit-time, though you could alternately use ID. We (and this is the very presumtuous royal we, as really at the moment it's largely Molly and Michelle who do the tagging) set a bill to complete when all the additional tagging that can be done is complete. Only bills marked so are exposed to the API and outside world. It is possible for a bill to be marked complete and more changes made to it, so for that purpose the commit time is useful and it's provided in the bill listing so you don't have to re-download things.

Now, if you mean bill status with regards to Congress' workflow, we don't really do any tracking thereof beyond use of the bill's locations. IH/IS for introduced in the House or Senate, RH/RS for reported, pcs/pch for placed on the Senate or House calendars, etc. We tend to focus initially on the introduced bills (unless a bill has skipped introduction and been simultaneously submitted to a committee in which case its first form is reported.

As far as parallel committee drafts Jim can speak better to that level of 'inside baseball,' but I think a lot of committee process doesn't make it out in a timely manner, if I recall correctly.

[Jim Harper]

I think your best practice for updating data extracted from bills is to regularly download bills updated since your last API pull. 

Parallel committee drafts almost never get reported to the House floor and so don't get an XML version, so we don't mark them up ("almost" makes the statement not wrong). They are so rare that the exception is going to have only a tiny possible effect on your use-case. We follow the conventions of the Congress, using "IH/IS" for introduced bills, "RH/RS" for reported bills, etc.

We are almost always up-to-date on introduced bills, but presently aren't always as current on reported bills. (Typically, the changes are small between them. Even if they do change, it doesn't seem too harmful to alert people that a statute section was amended by an "introduced" version but is no longer by a "reported" version.) We aim to have all versions of all bills promptly marked up.

Between Don and I, have we answered your questions?