Re: federal register 2.0

The XML-version of the  federal register is indeed very nice work.
Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
This XML collection is potentially a great resource.
At least three things need to be done before the XML can be reused  
reliably in a mashup:

1) Provide a DTD or Schema
2) The XML does not contain any of the metadata which is in the  
"infobox" on the right of the HTML page.
In particular the reference/provenance information like the Document  
Citation and the Document ID are needed.
3) Inside the XML there is no URI pointing persistently to itself,  
neither is there a URI pointing to the HTML-page based on the XML.

A fantastic aspect of the site is the ability to link to individual  
paragraphs in the documents.
Mashups could potentially benefit from this feature.
But unfortunately, these links are not present in the XML.

Maarten

***********************************************************************
        M       maartenmarx@uva.nl  http://www.science.uva.nl/~marx
   Maarten
         r        Informatics Institute,   Universiteit van  Amsterdam
       xxx     Science Park 107 1098XG  Amsterdam The Netherlands
       x  x     Phone: +31 20 525 2888         Mobile: 06 400 16 120
***********************************************************************



On Jul 28, 2010, at 3:05 AM, Owen Ambur wrote:

> Thanks for the pointer, Ed.  It is good to see that notices of agency
> strategic plans can be discovered [1] and that links to the plans  
> themselves
> are provided in the notices.  See, for example, the notice of the  
> National
> Weather Service's (NWS) plan. [2]  NWS invites online comments. [3]
>
> However, it would be good if the plan itself were also available in a
> standard format, like StratML, so that the goal and objective  
> statements it
> contains could be discretely indexed and made available for  
> discovery and
> explicit commenting not only in NWS's stovepipe system but any other
> StratML-enabled service citizens may choose to use to keep track of  
> what
> their government is trying to accomplish.
>
> Owen
>
> [1]
> http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/search?conditions%5Bstart_date%5D=06
> %2F28%2F2010&conditions%5Bterm%5D=strategic+plan&facet=date
> [2]
> http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/07/27/2010-18383/national-weath
> er-service-nws-strategic-plan-20112020
> [3] http://www.weather.gov/com/stratplan/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org 
> ]
> On Behalf Of Ed Summers
> Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 11:22 AM
> To: public-egov-ig
> Subject: federal register 2.0
>
> I don't know if this got discussed on here much yet, but I discovered
> today via the Sunlight Foundation blog [1] that the Federal Register
> 2.0 site was recently released [2]. The Federal Register is one of the
> most important government publications in the US, since it is the most
> comprehensive publication of all the rules and regulations of the
> various agencies that make up US federal government.
>
> The new site is interesting to me for a few reasons:
>
> - it uses opensource technologies (ruby, ruby on rails, mysql, sphinx,
> nginx, apache2, varnish)
> - the source code for the website itself is opensource, and available
> to people to contribute changes/enhancements on github
> - there is machine readable data available various flavors of xml
> - there are permalinks for each entry in the Federal Register, which
> incourages citability
> - it is deployed in the cloud on Amazon's ec2/s3
> - it was the result of an egov software contest organized by the
> Sunlight Foundation
>
> I wrote up some more of my thoughts in my blog [3], if you care to
> comment here or there. If anyone from NARA, GPO or Sunlight Foundation
> are reading, nice work!
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/meet-the-new-federal-register/
> [2] http://www.federalregister.gov/
> [3]
> http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/07/27/federal-register-embraces-the-web-and
> -opensource/
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 29 July 2010 06:36:02 UTC