Akoma Ntoso Challenge by the Library of Congress

As many of you may have already read, the U.S. Library of Congress has announced a data challenge using Akoma Ntoso. The challenge lasts for three months and offers a $5,000 prize to the winner.

In this challenge, participants are asked to mark up four Congressional bills, provided as raw text, into Akoma Ntoso.

If you have the time to participate in this challenge and can fulfill all the eligibility rules, then I encourage you to step up to the challenge. This is a good opportunity to give Akoma Ntoso a try – to both learn the new model and to help us to identify any changes or adaptations that must be made to make Akoma Ntoso suitable for use with Congressional legislation.

You are asked, as part of you submission, to identify gaps in Akoma Ntoso’s design along with documenting the methodology you used to construct your solution to the four bills. You’re also encouraged to use any of the available open-source editors that are currently available for editing Akoma Ntoso and to provide feedback on their suitability to the task.

I would like to point out that I also provide an Akoma Ntoso editor at http://legisproweb.com. It is free to use on the web along with full access to all the information you need to customize the editor. However, while our customers do get an unrestricted internal license to the source code, our product is not open source. At the end of the day, I must still make a living. Nonetheless, I believe that you can use any editor you wish to create your four Akoma Ntoso documents – it’s just that the sponsors of the competition aren’t looking for feedback on commercial tools. If you do choose to use my editor, I’ll be there to provide any support you might need in terms of features and bug fixes to help speed you on your way.