For the consensus wiki, wouldn't the text be enough?
On looking further at the HTML for the Bills, I think I can put
something together, thank you. Last time I looked, I thought there
was no standard format to the documents I found, but the Bills on
their RSS feed seems to follow some sort of standard.
Looking at the markup, it looks like it's going to be a lot of work to
piece each document together. For example, each line of text is
separated into separate table rows - even where the lines form one
paragraph. I can put some code together to create a sensible itemized
structure - it is a matter of time.
If anyone has attempted scraping Bills before, I would love to hear
from them. There might be some reusable code....
Many thanks,
Tom Kaneko
On 17 Nov 2010, at 11:55, Francis Irving wrote:
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 01:55:58PM +0000, Tom Kaneko wrote:
The problem I have is that the site is a little empty! I could
really do with filling it up with information so that people can
start picking documents apart. I envisioned government Bills to be
converted into this "consensus" format, but of course, as we all
know, getting machine-readable bills data is not possible at the
moment.
You can get the text of bills - the Free Our Bills campaign is about
it being structured (e.g. properly marked up how a Bill would alter an
Act in a computer readable way).
For the consensus wiki, wouldn't the text be enough?
1. How is the campaign to "free our Bills" going? And will having a
working example of what free Bills can be used for help?
We haven't been actively persuing the public campaign it recently -
lots of other things going on.
Meanwhile lots of progress has been made at the National Archive in
the related area of publishing enacted legislation
(http://www.legislation.gov.uk/).
There's still lots to do though before legislation and bills are fully
machine readable.
Francis
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