Theory of the Web as One Big Database
Hash Tag Collection
Legislative Data Standards
As Congress moves to XML and persistent and thoughtfully formed URLs for documents, the ability of web sites to use these as standards for indexing and labeling related online documents effectively becomes possible. And the possibilities are endless.
Internet and web technology can, if applied in a RESTful way, finally give legislative documents such as bills and votes unique, universal and understandable names/locations/identifiers. So far, the confusion over bill numbers, long and short names, and the tradition of using the main sponsors last names as ways to refer to legislation has led to a popular consensus method of identifying legislation. And as long as you are familiar with the popular connotation, you can find related information. However, there is an effort to use the Internet naming conventions (URIs and URLs) to bring order necessary for the interconnected web where people want to be instantly connected with source documents as well as related material.
Once the standards are issued, then the exciting work of using them for metadata for the vast web will start in earnest. Already, there have been proprietary standards proposed for citing legislative documents on the Internet. However, they are doomed for failure do to the lack of general consensus.
Here are some important resources:
- http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pSXbYFphmLmb7JZEy2PxSJg Example of XPath used to make a database query of a Role Call vote
- Example of legislation in XML http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc110/h1_ih.xml
- Legislative Handles http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfxgcdfc_52fsvj7qn3
