I’m starting to build out the XML infrastructure for Richmond Sunlight, so that third party websites can easily download or routinely syndicate the site’s data. This would be useful for somebody who wants to quickly populate a database or a spreadsheet with current information about the General Assembly, but more interestingly, it would also be useful for web applications that want routinely-updated data. Imagine that a legislator wanted to have her website provide embedded, real-time data about the status of her bills, her upcoming committee meetings, and her recent votes. Or imagine that an interest group wanted to list all bills of interest to them, along with their current status and when they’re next scheduled for discussion in committee. All of that and more is possible with XML syndication.
The first step that I’ve taken towards this end is providing fauXML for legislators’ data (as opposed to bill data or committee data, for instance), but as I’ve built it out, I’ve realized that I’m not entirely sure what would be useful to people. At the moment I’m providing the legislator’s district, chamber, party, bill count, cash on hand, and tag cloud metrics. I stopped there when I realized that I simply hadn’t thought through the data that should be available. To see any legislator’s data, simply append “/xml/” to his URL on Richmond Sunlight, such as Sen. Creigh Deeds’ XML.
If you’re a website developer, a legislator, or you work for an interest group, I hope you’ll contact me or post a comment here to let me know what information would be useful to you via XML syndication.
And please don’t count on this data for anything right now. Everything about it could change tomorrow.
01/26/07 Update: The URL has changed for the API. Now, instead of adding “/xml/”, simply append .xml to the legislator’s name in the URL. For instance, here’s Sen. Creigh Deeds’ XML.
Unrelated…what I’d like to have as a somewhat useful gadget is a function that compares legislators to each other. Envision, say, Bob Marshall in the center, and the other 99 members of the House in their own circles, tethered to the ball in the center by a line. The closer the circles are to Marshall, the more they vote with him. This could be done with bills that have a specific tag (for example, who agreed the most with Marshall on abortion bills), or multiple tags (using boolean operators, like stem cells OR abortion).
But, you know, pie in the sky, and all that, with my excessive love of stunningly good graphical displays of data.
Well, I think that actually is related — I hope to be able to open up the API enough that anybody can gather the data to create just such a gadget. I figure I could just provide an integer in response to a paired query — a request for the vote overlap between a pair of legislators could be met with a percentage indicating how often their votes were simpatico.
Being able to track all similar bills in both chambers in one place would be terrific. We are expecting about 50 mental health related bills this upcoming session.