|
Indicator: 1
[Output]
Measurements in/of Publication
| Type |
Actual |
| StartDate |
|
| EndDate |
|
| Timeliness & Machine-Readability |
A- |
| Description |
Bills are a "pretty-good-news" story in legislative transparency. Most are promptly published. It would be better, of course,
if they were all immediately published at the moment they were introduced, and if both the House and Senate published last-minute,
omnibus bills before debating and voting on them. A small gap in authority exists around bills: people look to the Library
of Congress rather than Congress or the Government Printing Office, which
are better authorities for bill content, but this has not caused any problems. Once published, bill information remains
available, which is good. Publication of bills in HTML on the THOMAS site makes them reasonably machine-discoverable. Witness
the fact that searching for a bill will often turn up the version at that source. Where bills could improve some is machine-readability.
Some information such as sponsorship and U.S. code references is present in the bills that
are published in XML, and nearly all bills are now published in XML, which is great. Much more information should
be published machine-readably in bills, though, such as references to agencies and programs, to states or localities, and
so on, referred to using standard identifiers. With the work that the THOMAS system does to gather information in one place,
bill data are good. This is relative to other, less-well-published data, though. There is yet room for
improvement.
|
|
