This week marked a big milestone for us. The U.S. House of Representatives released the U.S. Code in XML. You can see the announcement by the Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-Ohio), here. This is a big step forward towards a more transparent Congress. As many of you know, my company, Xcential, has worked closely with the Law Revision Counsel on this project. It has been an honor to provide our expertise as part of our on-going efforts with the U.S. House of Representatives.
This project has been a great opportunity for us to update the U.S. House of Representatives technology platform by introducing new XML schema techniques along with robust and high performance conversion tools. Our eleven years in this field, working on an international scale, has given us valuable insights into XML techniques which we were able to bring to bear to ensure that success of this project.
The feedback has been very good:
- Darrell Issa (R-California) – Issa Praises Opening of U.S. Code in XML
- Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland – Minority Whip) – Democratic Whip Hoyer Praises Digital Compilation and Publishing of the United States Code of Laws
- Committee on House Administration (Chairman: Candice Miller) – New XML Access to U.S. Code Changes Legislative Transparency Landscape
- TechPresident – House Published U.S. Code in XML
- The Hill – House makes US code available for bulk download
- Sunlight Foundation – The U.S. Code arrives in XML
- Alex Howard’s E Pluribus Unum – U.S. House of Representatives publishes U.S. Code as open government data
- Robert Richard’s Legal Informatics Blog – U.S. House of Representatives Makes U.S. Code Available in Bulk XML
As you can expect, members of the technical community have swiftly picked up on this release and are actively finding ways to use the data it provides. Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us has already started – check out his work here. Why did I already know he would be the first to jump in. 🙂
Of course, if you know me, you’ll know that I also have something up my sleeve. I’ll be spending my weekends and evenings for the next few weeks to release an Akoma Ntoso transform coincident with an upcoming OASIS LegalDocML announcement. Keep watching my blog for more info.
This project has been one of numerous projects we are working on right now. We have a very similar project underway in Asia and an Akoma Ntoso project nearing completion using our HTML5-based editor, LegisProWeb, in South America. I’ll be providing an update on LegisProweb in the coming weeks.
