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Hacking Congress

Posted by timothy on from the nicely-though dept.

lousyd writes "Paul Ford, a writer and web developer, has kicked off a new column called 'Hacking Congress' on the O'Reilly xml.com web site. The inaugural article, "Screenscraping the Senate", discusses what he hopes to achieve and some of his initial work on turning publicly available information on U.S. Senators into XML data."

3 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. He's not hacking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Not in any real sense of the word. Hacking, in the old sense, is to approach something with playful cleverness and invent your way around problems. This guy is just marking up text, which is neither playful, nor clever, nor inventive. Bah humbug!

  2. Publicly available data... so? by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There's a ton of publicly available data that I'm not sure would do anyone much more good in any format. i.e. you can get a copy of the fiscal budget of the USA, but I'm not sure an XML version is much better than the deforesting hardcopy... which is page after page of staggeringly large numbers in miniscule print, identified with really, really obscure allocation categories. (~63 meg download, have fun!)
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005 /

    --
    stuff |
  3. He's right, *.senate.gov sites are a mess. by dameron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've recently publish a political parody site composed of haiku coupled with public domain information gathered from the various .gov and .mil sites on the net.

    I have to agree with the article that the senate sites are some of the homeliest hodgepodges of html I've seen since I typed "+Goth site:geocities.com" into google. Culling information for my site (which I'll plug here: www.dailyhaiku.com has been difficult and exacerbated by a lack of consistent presentation cross government site (*.senate.gov sites are particulary awful).

    In a completely selfish way I'd love it if all images on government sites were tagged in valid xml with copyright information, date and time, subjects, location, etc. As it is I have to guess whether the pictures I appropriate are under copyright or public domain, and I'm just waiting for Zell Miller to send me a letter complaining about that picture of him and that scimitar.

    It looks like this kind of project could make sites like mine more viable and enhance the public's access to government work (which is mostly in the public domain if created by federal employees as part or their work duties).

    -dameron

    --- DailyHaiku.com saying more in 17 syllables than Big Media says all day.