1.1: House and Senate Membership

[Provide an] authoritative, really well-published source of information about House and Senate membership.

Other Information:

How does the public find out about who holds office in the House of Representatives and Senate? A couple of ways. The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress is a compendium of information about all present and former members of the United States Congress (as well as the Continental Congress), including delegates and resident commissioners. The "Bioguide" website is a great resource for searching out historical information. But there's no sign that it's Congress' repository of record, and it's little known by users, giving it low authority marks. Bioguide scores highly on availability- we know of no problems with up-time or completeness (though it could use quicker updating when new members are elected). Bioguide isn't structured for discoverability. Most people haven't seen it, because search engines aren't finding it. Bioguide does a good thing in terms of machine-readability, though. It assigns a unique ID to each of the people in its database. This is the first, basic step in machine-readability, and the Bioguide ID should probably be the standard for machine-identification of elected officials wherever they are referred to in data. Unfortunately, the biographical content in Bioguide is not machine-readable. The other ways of learning about House and Senate membership are nothing if not ad hoc. The lists of members that appear on the House and Senate websites are adequate for some purposes. They're authoritative, available, and discoverable due to their prime location on the top-level House and Senate domains. But the HTML presentation on the House side does not break out key information in ways useful for computers. The Senate includes a link to an XML representation that is machine readable. Good job, Senate. The rest of the information flows to the public via congressmembers' individual websites. These are non-authoritative websites that search engine spidering combines to use as a record of the Congress's membership. They are available and discoverable, again because of that prime house.gov and senate.gov real estate. But they only reveal data about the membership of Congress incidentally to communicating the press releases, photos, and announcements that representatives want to have online.

Indicator(s):

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