After posting House Launches Transparency Portal I started to think about all the identity issues that such a resource raises. None of them new but with greater access to the stuff of legislation, the more those issues come to the fore.
The easy ones are going to be identify the bills themselves, what parts of the U.S. Code they modify, legislative history (in terms of amendments), etc. And the current legislation can be tracked, etc.
Legislation identifies the subject matter to which it applies, what the rules on the subject are to become, and a host of other details.
But more than that, legislation, indirectly, identifies who will benefit from the legislation and who will bear the costs of it. Not identified in the sense that we think of social security numbers, addresses or geographic location, but just as certainly identification.
For example, what if a bill in Congress says that it applies to all cities with more than two million inhabitants. (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston – largest to smallest) Sound fair on the face of it but only four cities in four different states are going to benefit from it.
Another set of identity issues will be who wrote the legislation. Oh, err, members of Congress are “credited” with writing bills but it is my understanding that is a polite fiction. Bills are written by specialists in legislative writing. Some work for the government, some for lobbyists, some for other interest groups, etc.
It would make a very interesting subject identity project to use authorship techniques to try to identify when Covington & Burling LLP, Arnold & Porter LLP, Monsanto, or the hand of the ACLU can be detected in legislation.
Whether you identify the “actual” author of a bill or not, there is also the question of the identity of who paid for the legislation?
All of these “identity” issues and others have always existed with regard to legislation, regulations, executive orders, etc., but making bills available electronically may change how those issues are approached.
Not a plan of action but just imagine say a number people are interested enough in a particular bill to loosely organize and produce an annotated version that ties it to existing laws and probable sources of the bill and who it benefits. Other people, perhaps specialists in campaign finances or even local politics for an area, could further the analysis started by others.
I have been told that political blogging works that way, unlike the conventional news services that horde information and therefore only offer partial coverage of any event.
Whatever semantic technology that is used to produce annotations, RDF, linked data, topic maps (my favorite), you are still going to face complex identity issues with legislation.
Suggestions on possible approaches or interfaces?