Laws affecting bills

[rond...@dancingmammoth.com]

Hey all,

I have a question about the bills listed here - https://github.com/favila/wikisourceify/tree/master/xml.

I am trying to extract laws that are affected by these bills and I have come across an issues with laws marked with an entity-type of act. 

My understanding is that this refers to the popular name, but I have been pulling out names such as 113 S 799 and 113 HR 3273. I've been told

that names such as these should be distinguishable with a “official title” property, which I have not found to be true.

It would much appreciated if I could get a better understanding of the approach I should be taking.

Thanks so much for any help!

Rachelle 

[mollybohmer]

Hi Rachelle,

For a while we were marking up bills that had no short title with the "Popular Name" attribute using such a format, thinking that was the best way to identify references in bills with no other unique identifiers (Popular Name, Public Law number, US Code reference, Statutes at Large volume and page number). We are currently in the process of adding a NEW @entity-type value of "bill-by-number", which formats such citations at value="bill-by-number/[congress number]/[bill type]/[bill number]/[section]/[subsection]/etc." So the @value attribute on a "bill-by-number" citation for "HR  3099 of the 110th congress" would be value="billy-by-number/110/hr/3099", or "section 291(a) of HR 4508 of the 113th Congress" would be value="bill-by-number/113/hr/4508/s:291/ss:a". We have a few recent bills that include the citation, but it should be fully implemented in new bills this week.

But for most bills that have been marked up to this point, most can be identified with a @entity-type value of "act" and a @value value starting with "113". There should not be any distinguished with an "official title" property.

Let me know if this makes sense!

Molly B.

[Jim Harper]

This leaves many references to bill numbers treated as popular names, does it, Molly?

I think that needs to be fixed, if there's no way to distinguish references by bill number from references by popular names in the data.

Jim

[mollybohmer]

This is correct.

There should be a not-too-complicated way to transform the bill-number tags that were previous marked up as "Popular Name" citations to the new "bill-by-number" citations - will need to ask our programmer Don when he returns. Otherwise, this may be a very tedious August recess project.

Molly