The US Congress has released the official API. In Italy we have data.camera.it and dati.senato.it
Congress, which is the legislative body of the federal government of the United States of America, has officially launched a web page with APIs for accessing services and documents. APIs are application programming interfaces, which are systems that allow you to share structured data through applications. This means that with the help of a computer scientist or a geek friend, US citizens and others can investigate certain laws and, for example, explore the entire legislative process of a bill.
In the past, data was somehow extracted using scraping techniques. L ‘ Government Editorial Office (GPO) Show data download In large quantities for some groups. today with Congress.gov beta API Basically, the system is arranged and access to structured data is guaranteed.
As stated in the noteCongress.gov API Launched at the beginning of September, it will allow access to bills, amendments, committee reports, appointments, treaties and correspondence for the Chamber. Over time they will add hearing minutes and communications from the Senate. To use the service just register here sWork to get a free API key
From a technical point of view, it is an API comfort It displays the data in a hierarchical navigation format with the answers given in the . format XML or json . XML format is the default setting for the API.
And what about Italy?
For several years we had the open data department of the Chamber and Senate. The activity of Parliament in joint session since 1948 and the activities of bicameral bodies (including bicameral committees) starting with the thirteenth legislature are available at Parliament website. For the activities of single-chamber, bi-chamber and commissions of inquiry, a reference is also available online (with links, if any, to texts) bySenate Historical Archive for the Republic. Both the House and the Senate have created “historical” websites that give access to the contents of past legislative bodies available in digital form (not only parliamentary documents, but also photographic archives, inventories, bibliographies, etc.).
What is data.senato.it
This is the goal ofDirect access to data from the Senate of the Republic. It promises daily updates of freely usable information (open data) regarding every aspect of political and institutional activity: bills with their procedures, electronic voting of the council, committees, parliamentary groups and many other information. Here you download the data.
The data is available in Linked Data format and released under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 3.0) for free reuse.
It can be queried in a specialized search language viaSparkle end pointalso to make it easier to connect to other sources’ structured data sets.
Sparkle It is a standard W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) data query language and is one of the mainstays of open linked data and the Semantic Web, a methodology increasingly used by data providers, including enterprises.
What is data.camera.it
a publishing platform And the exchange of open data related to the activities and bodies of the Chamber, to be downloaded or interrogated. Here you find a fileOntology of published data They are many. The unit of measurement information contained in a data set and the tripartite RDF: constitutes the minimum unit of information and represents an assertion (statement), divided into a subject (Topics), Relationship (you preach) and the subject (Goal).
The site is clearer than the Senate site, but no less difficult. Not for everyone but full of information.
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