I’m gradually adding fauXML feeds for every legislator on Richmond Sunlight. (“Faux XML” meaning that, yeah, it’s XML, but it doesn’t conform to any particular DTD. I’m making it up as I go along, because there is no legislator data DTD, and life’s too short to invent one.) Right now, every legislator’s XML file provides their name, Richmond Sunlight ID, district number, chamber, party, session bill count, cash on hand, and session tag cloud data. Next I’ll add a listing of all active bills, batting average, and perhaps the last few comments on each legislator’s bills. (Complete voting records are already available as CSV. I intend to provide this as XML, too.)
The XML for a given legislator can be retrieved by hacking off the trailing slash on his Richmond Sunlight URL and appending “.xml” to the URL. By way of example, here’s my legislators’ XML data: Sen. Creigh Deeds and Del. Rob Bell.
Any moderately clever programmer could use this data to provide current legislator data on their own site. A local political party could provide automatically-updated information about their representatives during session, or a legislator could have her website inform constituents about what she’s been up to.
Richmond Sunlight is neat, but it’s as a web service that I think it will be really useful.
Huh. I have to admit that I’d never had much of an interest in Richmond Sunlight until now, but I became curious when you showed the overarching xml tag cloud for the upcoming session as it describes the prefiled bills. Now that I can quickly see how an individual legislator contributed to or conformed with that cloud, it’s kind of nifty.
I also finished reading Del. Albo’s bills since I stopped by. If you ever needed proof that it’s more important to be a good electioneer than it is to be a good legislator if you want to get ahead in politics….
How about basic demographic information? e.g. age, gender, occupation.
Well, sure I can do that. It hadn’t occurred to me that might be useful to anybody, but it’s so easy to add, I can’t see any reason why not to do that. :)
Thank you.
How about a house-members.xml and senate-members.xml that lists the members and gives a reference to their individual legislator xml file?
:-)
Thanks
Absolutely, yes. Next I’m going to create XML files for every bill, but after that will come OPML files for bills by year and legislators by chamber. Then vote data as XML (by bill or legislator) and, at that point, nearly all of Richmond Sunlight’s data will be entirely portable and freely reproducible.
I intend to take such additions slowly, since they’re all academic at this point — nobody’s using them for anything yet. :)
Is there XML available for topical/keyword searches? I’m working on turning the Politics section at RVANews (http://rvanews.com/sections/politics/) into a useful resource (instead of basically an archive page).
I can see me wanting to pull all bills having to do with “Richmond” or “Stupid Downtown ABC laws.” I’m sure there is *something* I could use that for.
No XML, but there is RSS. You could get a feed of all bills tagged “Richmond” at this URL.
I’d love love love to see a query string style API that returns XML. Sort of like how Google Charts works.
But regardless, this is awesome. Good work.
I’d like to see that, too. :) But I’m afraid that’s pretty low on the priority list. That’s something I’d do if there were already people using the existing XML. But what with the zero people taking advantage of it right now, it’s tough to justify. :)