Better (and More) Congressional Member Information by Derek Willis.
From the post:
Over the summer, as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., haggled about the budget, energy, immigration and other issues, we’ve been at work upgrading the information about members contained in the Congress API.
Part of that process involved adding new elements to some of our member responses, but just as important is that with this update, the API is now part of a larger congressional data infrastructure effort that extends outside The Times.
First, we’ve added more detail to the member and member list responses, which now include a broader range of social media identifiers and other data that will help make it easier to connect to other sources of information. In particular, member responses now include Twitter and Facebook account names as well as the Facebook “id” used by the Graph API.
We’ve also added more details about lawmakers’ websites, including the address and the URL of the RSS feed, if one is present. There are a number of official congressional sites that do not use RSS, and if you want to retrieve press releases from them (and those sites with feeds), we have released a Ruby gem that does just that.
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That is just a part of the improvements that Derek describes in his post.
The sharing of identifiers for members of Congress from different information systems is particularly interesting.