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Permanent Links For US Legislation Documents
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 09, 2008 06:46 PM
from the get-crackin'-blue-book-kids dept.
from the get-crackin'-blue-book-kids dept.
dizzymslizzy writes "With prompting from the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, the US Library of Congress announced today that its online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles, for legislation documents.
As Free Government Info says, 'it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600-word description of how to link on another page.' Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS: 'Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.'
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"democracy" isn't just jingoist slogan (Score:4, Informative)
something like this should have been established a long time ago. instead of listening to political demagogues engaging in mudslinging and espousing empty rhetoric, it would be much more productive to actually research current issues with direct access to new bills and legislative proposals. and once you have an educated and informed public, you can conduct mass referendums and let the public make policy decisions themselves (at least on the issues that effect our everyday lives, like drug policy, government surveillance, universal health care, tax policy, gay marriage, etc.).
ideally, the media would do its job keeping the public informed and hold politicians accountable for their actions. but sadly the mainstream media seems to have lost every shred of journalistic integrity and would rather cover celebrity gossip than political corruption, and the consolidation of the media by a handful of media conglomerates means that a handful of people control how the masses perceive the world, and news reporting is often skewed to reflect the world view of our cultural hegemons.
luckily, the internet is starting to change this by decentralizing media distribution and giving individuals access to a wide variety of independent news sources. no longer are corporate media conglomerates the gatekeepers of information. before i'd heard about THOMAS, i used to visit OnTheIssues.org [ontheissues.org], which provides detailed voting records and public statements (as well as summaries of legislation) of current political leaders and presidential candidates. but a democratic government needs to directly provide this info to the public, and the web is the best way to do this.
i'm glad that this is finally achieved with the THOMAS database. however, i think they need to keep permanent online records for all government officials past and present--right now it only displays congressional records, but that gives the public no oversight of the rest of the government. even if many positions are appointed by the president, we can still hold the president accountable for the actions of his appointees. representative democracy only works if the electorate provides negative feedback when politicians fail to act in the interest of the people. that means the public needs to be ever vigilante of government corruption and incompetence. perhaps an online system can even be established so the public can give direct feedback to government officials on their present performance, and not just limit democratic feedback to public elections. for instance, if a particular cabinet member's public approval drops below 50%, then the president would be forced to appoint a new leader. and if the president's public approval drops below 30%, then that would be cause for a congressional hearing, potentially leading to impeachment.
the next step is to move beyond representative democracy and actually allow the public to participate directly in the democratic process. i know many people think that the average person isn't capable of making public policy decisions, but they can speak for themselves, not for others. i don't need some clueless politician making policy decisions for me. right now the government is run by a very particular social group most aptly described as the political aristocracy. how can a government be trusted to act in the best interest of its citizens when it is run entirely by individuals who come from a completely different socioeconomic background than most of the population. the ruling class of America are all rich old men who are completely disconnected from the reality of the average person. at the very minimum, politicians should be paid a salary equivalent to the mean annual salary of the average American. otherwise, if all legislators reside in the uppermost tax bracket, how can we expect them to make progress tax reforms that are in the interest of the average person?
in the past, logistical problems prevented regular broad-based referendums from being conducted to give the public
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It was.
The GAO (Government Accountability Office) publishes html, text, and PDF versions of all legislation. Thomas even links to them when you're looking a bill, so it wasn't very hard to make a permlink to legislation.
The only real downside was that the GAO doesn't update as fast as Thomas does. Plus a lot of "noobs" would think the Thomas links were permanent and paste them into discussions.
National Initiative for Democracy (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Cuz if you step on the wrong agency's documents .....Even crabs wouldn't scavenge upon you after that
This kind of comment used to be a joke-- now, in the present US, it sounds like prophecy. God, people, just think of the damage wrought in the last eight years.
Re:Got UV 5,000,000 Sunblock ? Painful... (Score:2)
You know what is painful? That a thread starting out at 0 (because i intentionally disable the karma bonus (without bragging that it's turned off)) is knocked to -0 or -0, Off-topic (either before or after others' comments are added), then through sloppy non-tracking and dodgy code of Slashdot, other comments can be appended, gain bonus points, and even quoted the original/slammed/ridiculed gp, and yet the gp does not get automatically "raised" commensurate to (but not necessarily higher than) useful commen
Nice documentation (Score:2)
Nice - you should be able to setup a Firefox keyword search for anything you want from there!
Pug
Thomas is one of the hardest sites to use (Score:5, Insightful)
That website is one of the hardest to use. One of the biggest faults is that there is no differentiation in the search results between major and minor efforts. Try these three searches and you'll see how difficult it is to use:
http://thomas.loc.gov/ [loc.gov]
1. Find the No Child Left Behind Act
2. Find the roll call of the recent Wall Street bail-out
3. Find HR 700 from the 103rd Congress (this should presumably be the easiest since you have the "key")
It's almost as if they do not want you to read it.
Wow (Score:2)
Re:Thomas is one of the hardest sites to use (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
well, it is useless, but google isn't. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athomas.loc.gov+no+child+left+behind [google.com]
dunno what the 1st link is, but the second link on google, lists no child left behind on a page of laws...
Re: (Score:2)
In the EU the problem is the same. It is a mess to link EU documents, so the best thing you can do is to mirror them.
The European access to documents directive is undergoing a recast procedure. [europa.eu] Further an Italian MEP just released a draft report for the annual report on document access [europa.eu]. All members of the LIBE Committee can make a difference.
While this sort of legislation really makes high impact there are only few persons who care about this field and follow the legislation. Your chance to get involved, be
Re: (Score:2)
It's almost as if they do not want you to read it.
Are you really surprised at all? It's a token gesture. "Hey, check out all of the legislation we've done online in a really poorly designed system!"
I'll wait for some geek to cook up a script that will organize the pages better.
Re:Thomas is one of the hardest sites to use (Score:4, Informative)
1) http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.107hr1 [loc.gov]
2) http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml [house.gov] (warning, might not be a permalink; as a bonus, the bill text proper [loc.gov])
3) http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.103hr700 [loc.gov]
All three in less than ten minutes. Though #3 was a gimme, and it was easier to find the bill than the roll call for #2.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I use http://govtrack.org./ [govtrack.org.] I also add their search engine to my Firefox.
Re: (Score:2)
Oops, I meant http://govtrack.us./ [govtrack.us.] govtrack.org is a squatter.
Thomas is a joy (Score:2)
compared to pretty much any state legislature site. I can find what I want quickly and easily, once I know the name of the bill, (which I can get from Google, etc.) The Massachusetts legislature's site makes me want put my head in blender.
Re: (Score:1)
I think part of the problem is that this contains all the lawyer speak of the actual bills, vs the news media speak for everyone else to consume.
Looks like they need to let Google index it and link it to news articles.
DOI's use the handle system (Score:3, Interesting)
But they seem less convoluted and actually make an effort for you to find them easily.
They are used extensively for academic publishing content.
http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/
Just use http://www.govtrack.us/ (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just use http://www.govtrack.us/ (Score:5, Informative)
+1 for good link: http://www.govtrack.us/ [govtrack.us]
-0.5 for making the link unclickable by putting it in the title
Things not to put in the title: links and the first half of a sentence concluded in the body (I usually skip over the titles).
Parent
I break up sentences in titles... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
i call dibs on the first legislative RickRoll.
Re: (Score:1)
Replying to negate incorrect mod. (slashcode needs a method to correct such without posting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that they'd be afraid of that. It would be too much of an eye-opener.
Re: (Score:1)
Time for some Legal Upgrades (Score:1)
With open-source collaborations, the code has to be easily accessible and clearly documented if you have any hope of bringing new contributors up to speed. Dense projects with bad documentation fail.
A member of the public that wants to research existing law and proposed changes has no effective tools on hand. This THOMAS thing is a joke compared to other documentation search systems.
I don't have to get a doctorate in computer s
About damn time! (Score:3, Informative)
Creating THOMAS links in the past was ridiculously complex. You essentially had to craft a search query that would go directly to the document you wanted to like. E.G. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.3162.enr: [loc.gov].
Whereas if you tried to use the link from THOMAS' search results, you would get something like http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:15:./temp/~c107zRB7G3:: [loc.gov]. Of course, this link is time limited and it isn't at all clear how you would construct the permanent link.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.107hr3162 [loc.gov] is much easier to construct and is somewhat clear. Now if only they would provide the link in the THOMAS search results.
US Law needs a "Source Code Management" System (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a bit off topic, but I'm surprised how fast and loose congress is with the laws of this country in general. I hope that, within my lifetime, no change to the law is committed to the books without some kind of documentation, a diff if you will, complete with names of everyone who worked on a change, be it a lawmaker or lobbyist. If someone amended a bill, it should be tracked and tied with the name of the person who added the amendment. How come companies can be so strict with the source code of their revenue-generating products, yet we can't provide the same controls on the laws that govern the United States?
Re:US Law needs a "Source Code Management" System (Score:4, Funny)
Wikipedia for the US congress? Now that could be funny.
Rejected by Supreme court. [Citation needed for proof of constitutionality.]
Repassed congress and house. [It's for the children, damn the constitution.]
Veto by president. [Screw you.]
Veto ruled unconstitutional by judicial review. [Screw you too.]
Parent
That's what Thomas is. (Score:2)
Thomas is an external front end to the Congressional bill management system. The actual bill source is maintained within the back end system that Thomas queries. It's a web front end to a legacy database system, which is why it didn't have stable URLs. It's a bit painful to use because it has nothing like PageRank to move the "important" stuff to the top of results. But that's as it should be, because you don't want your source code control system deciding what's "important".
Re: (Score:1)
payment link for US leg. docs (Score:2)
I swear that what I read the first time I saw the title and then it got me thinking wouldn't that be a cool idea? Instead of us geeks having to find our own lobbyist we could just use distributed funding to pay for the laws that we want. Kind of like community special interest pressure.
Aaron James (Score:1)