Examining Citations in Federal Law using Python by Gary Sieling.
From the post:
Congress frequently passes laws which amend or repeal sections of prior laws; this produces a series of edits to law which programmers will recognize as bearing resemblance to source control history.
In concept this is simple, but in practice this is incredibly complex – for instance like source control, the system must handle renumbering. What we will see below is that while it is possible to get some data about links, it is difficult to resolve what those links point to.
Here is an example paragraph where, rather than amending a law, the citation serves as a justification for why several words are absent in one section:
(…)
There has been some discussion lately about good examples of using topic maps with particular data sets.
Curious how you would solve the problem posed here using a topic map?
For extra credit, how would you map from particular provisions in a bill to the person(s) most likely to benefit from them?