Eric Mill of Sunlight Labs has posted Data for Better Bill Searching, on the Sunlight Labs Blog.
Here is an excerpt:
I’ve put up a dataset on Github that maps popular search terms to bills in Congress. It’s a simple, 5-column CSV designed to help people create better search engines that take in user input to search for bills. The idea is that this will be useful to, and get contributions from, the community of people out there working with legislation and building tools around them.
It’s humble – I started it out with a mere 7 rows, assigning the keywords “Obamacare”, “SOPA”, “PIPA”, and “PPACA” to the appropriate bills. There are certainly more good candidates than that, so please contribute via pull request, or if you don’t know how to do that, open an issue and talk about it with words.
This is intended to fill gaps that automated systems won’t easily fill. The word “Obamacare” appears in no official metadata about any bills at all, or in the text of any of them. It is a political slogan, perhaps inappropriate for legal documents, but like it or not it is the handle by which many people think of the legislation, and search applications should be responsive to it. [...]
For more information, please see the complete post.
Tags: Bill nicknames, Eric Mill, Legal authority control, Legal descriptive metadata, Legal information retrieval, Legal metadata, Legislative information systems, Popular name table, Popular names of bills, Sunlight Labs
