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[It is easy to] find out about the committees to which Congress delegates much of its work, and the subcommittees to which
the work gets further distributed.
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If you want to find out about the committees to which Congress delegates much of its work, and the subcommittees to which
the work gets further distributed, you might have to form a committee / a search party. The Senate has committee names and
URLs prominently available on its main website, and the House does too. But that would just be the starting point for researching
what all these committees do and who serves on them. For that, you'd go to
individual committee websites, each one different from the others. With the data scattered about this way, the Internet
can't really see it. The Senate has a little known machine-readable listing of its membership and their assignments. More
prominence, data such as subcommittees and jurisdiction, and use of a recognized set of standard identifiers would take this
resource a long way. Without a recognized place to go to get data about committees, this area suffers from
lacking authority. To the extent there are data, availability is not a problem, but machine-discoverability suffers
for having each committee publish distinctly, in formats like HTML, who their members are, who their leaders are, and what
their jurisdiction is. Until committee data are centrally published using standard identifiers (for both committees and their
members), machine-readability will be very low. The Internet makes sense of congressional committees as best it
can, but a whole lot of organizing and centralizing- with a definitive, always-current, and machine-readable record
of committees, their memberships, and their jurisdictions- would create a lot of clarity in this area with a minimum of effort.
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