Thanks, Francis. I corrected the XML file and the scraper yesterday afternoon, so hopefully the data is now good. And I let my LOC contact know about HR4517...
1050
Francis
francisgavila
May 4, 2012 11:46 pm
I'm looking for machine-readable Bioguide data, in particular the short biographical paragraphs for currently-serving congressmen. I know about bioguide html:...
1051
Eric Mill
konklone
May 5, 2012 12:43 am
I've asked the same question, of Josh, and of people inside Congress. The XML isn't available publicly, and it's not obvious whether or when it will be. ...
1052
Eric Mill
konklone
May 5, 2012 12:46 am
At the bottom of the House Clerk's site <http://clerk.house.gov/>, they list this email address at the bottom to contact them: info.clerkweb@... I...
1053
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 11, 2012 4:08 pm
I re-ran my bioguide scraper and updated those files: http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/bioguide1.csv http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/bioguide2.csv ...
1054
Eric Mill
konklone
May 11, 2012 4:13 pm
At the House Legislative Data conference in February, the lady who invented the Bioguide was there, and after the conference she went and fixed a couple of...
1055
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 17, 2012 1:07 am
I've put this off just about long enough- GovTrack now has an API! Currently bills and people are included in the API. (Votes and committees will come later if...
1056
Eric Mill
konklone
May 17, 2012 3:40 am
Super awesome, really glad to see this happen. Nice job with the docs, too (and a nice reminder to redo and update my own). Are you using this in anything...
1057
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 17, 2012 10:58 am
... Thanks. I drew on a few ideas from RTC, e.g. I made sure the infrastructure I chose (Tasypie) supported __[operator] filtering. ... Not yet. The main...
1058
Eric Mill
konklone
May 17, 2012 3:16 pm
Sweet. Are you going to dive into text search at all? This has become the most useful thing to come out of RTC, though I haven't documented the search methods...
1059
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 17, 2012 3:24 pm
Probably, yeah. Right now the API is based on the Django ORM, which hits MySQL. That's not great for search so I have to see if I can switch it transparently...
1060
Eric Mill
konklone
May 17, 2012 3:37 pm
So fun. We had a nice (potential) success story at Sunlight the other day here, where we...
1061
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 23, 2012 10:25 pm
... Yeah, that is worth a try. I'm now sorting bills on the advanced search by a modified-prognosis score that just omits any boost that post office bills and...
1062
Eric Mill
konklone
May 23, 2012 10:38 pm
Sorting on prognosis is a cool idea. Does that mean that bills already passed into law will always occur at the top, or the bottom, or...? You are the last...
1063
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 23, 2012 10:55 pm
... Yeah this part is weird. The only status taken into account is whether the bill has been reported by committee. So reported bills get a boost. Enacted...
1064
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jun 7, 2012 11:44 pm
There was another vacated vote: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2012/roll327.xml So there will be no roll call 327 file on GovTrack. -- - Josh Tauberer (@JoshData) ...
1065
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jun 21, 2012 6:15 pm
Just a heads-up that the new congressman from AZ isn't in the data yet so there are a bunch of voting records with missing data. I'm hoping to get to it by...
1066
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jun 23, 2012 7:03 pm
Eric- Thanks for reporting this bug 15 months ago. :-) It is now fixed. (Although note that the committee code differs from the House's committee code because...
1067
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jul 13, 2012 1:20 am
Dear data re-users, This is advanced notice that on July 20 I'll be revising the terms of GovTrack's generic license agreement by adding the following...
1068
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jul 19, 2012 12:54 pm
Well I got the feedback I was asking for on these license changes! Here's the short story. Starting tomorrow this will be added to the ... This is pretty inert...
1069
Aaron Swartz
aaronswartz
Jul 22, 2012 1:50 pm
... progressive movement that partisan services tend to be more poorly-built than nonpartisan ones and, therefore, by acting so vehemently against ...
1070
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jul 22, 2012 9:41 pm
I don't see where in there you are being disparaging, let alone for NB being nonpartisan. You're basically just repeating NB's business model ... Feel free to...
1071
kmustatea
Aug 6, 2012 4:45 pm
Dear GovTrack, I'm having some trouble with some of the API methods. This seems to be a successful call: ...
1072
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Aug 7, 2012 3:48 pm
Hi, The backend is probably missing the conversion from the string constant to the proper numeric constant used in the database. I'll take a look. - Josh...
1073
Francis
francisgavila
Aug 28, 2012 10:04 pm
I'm looking for any existing RDF ontologies or vocabularies for US government stuff, in particular for bills, political persons (e.g. those with bioguide IDs),...
1074
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Aug 28, 2012 10:28 pm
Hey, Francis. I just copied the schemas into a new directory here: http://www.govtrack.us/data/rdf/schemas/ (They actually never were at those URLs. This was...
1075
kmustatea
Sep 1, 2012 12:55 am
Do you have an idea of how long it might take to fix this?...
1076
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Sep 1, 2012 1:36 am
Try now. Sorry I lost track of this issue. - Josh Tauberer (@JoshData) http://razor.occams.info...
1077
kmustatea
Sep 5, 2012 2:33 pm
This call doesn't seem to work (it's one of the examples given in the documentation). The problem is with the Option parameter, I think. ...
1078
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Sep 5, 2012 3:04 pm
Thanks. The last fix broke that parameter (internally it is a complicated mapping to a different database column). Should be working now. - Josh Tauberer...
