General Parliament Challenge Discussion

[Accountability Hack 2014]

To enter the Parliament Challenge, your project should focus on one of the following three areas: 

• Best tool for MPs 
• Best prediction tool 
• Best tool utilising Hansard data

[Tracy Green]

The data.parliament platform will provide access to lots of data sets that can be used during the Accountability Hack 2014

data.parliament is a platform that enables the sharing of UK Parliament’s data with users both within and outside of Parliament. It has been designed to complement existing data services and is the central publishing platform and data repository for data that is produced by Parliament. The current release is in Alpha and well be making further improvements to the site and adding new data sets over the coming months.

It provides both a repository (http://api.data.parliament.uk) for data and a Linked Data API (http://lda.data.parliament.uk). The platform’s ‘shop front’ or data catalogue can be found here (http://data.parliament.uk)

The following datasets and APIs are now available on data.parliament

· Commons Written Parliamentary Questions and Answers
· Lords Written Parliamentary Questions and Answers
· Commons Oral Questions and Question Times
· Early Day Motions
· Lords Divisions
· Commons Divisions
· Commons Members
· Lords Members
· Lords Registered Interests
· Constituencies
· Briefing Papers
· Papers Laid

A description of the APIs and their usage can be found at http://lda.data.parliament.uk. All the data exposed by the endpoints can be returned in a variety of formats not least JSON.

To get you started the team has coded two publically available demonstrators that make use of the data in data.parliament. The source code for these can found at https://github.com/UKParliData. One of the demonstrators, a client app, can be found working at http://ddpdemo.azurewebsites.net/. Also be sure to read our blog (http://blog.data.parliament.uk) for quick start guides, updates, and news about upcoming datasets.

The data.parliament team will be on hand at the Hack, both participating and networking through the event to gather feedback and ideas.. They're looking forward to seeing you there!

[Tracy Green]

Here's some more interesting links to parliamentary data. 

Check out the Rapid Apps team website http://www.digiminster.com/.

After last year's parly hack event @iaincollins also set up this great site with discussions and links to useful stuff 

http://feedback.public-scrutiny-office.org/feedback/

Parliament's website is here http://www.parliament.uk  and if you need to know the process of how legislation works then this is useful http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/passage-bill/.