Two new free and open sources of bulk data about the U.S. Congress have been created by Eric Mill of Sunlight Foundation, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, and posted on GitHub:
- Congressional bill data, 1973 to present, scraped from THOMAS
- “Every bill has a JSON file, data.json, with fields related to a bill’s ID, status, names, sponsorship, amendments, and history.”
- congress-legislators: Data about Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML:
- Data come from several sources. “Each legislator record is grouped into four guaranteed parts: id’s which relate the record to other databases, name information (first, last, etc.), biographical information (birthday, gender), and terms served in Congress.”
- congress scrapers:
- The code of the scrapers used to harvest the data.
HT @konklone: https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239001840603136, https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239600854306816, https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239829104136192
Tags: #freeTHOMAS, Congressional bills, Derek Willis, Eric Mill, Free access to law, GitHub, Joshua Tauberer, Legal open government data, Legislative data, Legislative information systems, Legislators, Members of Congress, Open government data, Open legislative data, Public access to legal information, Public access to legislative information, Scrapers and legal information systems, Scrapers for legal data, Scrapers for legislative data, Scrapers for THOMAS, THOMAS scrapers
October 6, 2012 at 3:42 pm |
James Jacobs and Eric Mill provide more detail here: http://freegovinfo.info/node/3791
October 13, 2012 at 6:03 pm |
US Congress data opened by @konklone @joshdata @derekwillis http://bit.ly/UViIJq @okfn HT @ppolitics
October 15, 2012 at 5:21 pm |
RT @derekwillis New on The Scoop: Congressional Data on GitHub, a Way Forward. http://blog.thescoop.org/archives/2012/10/15/congressional-data-github/ cc @konklone, @joshdata