data.parliament @ Accountability Hack 2014 by Zeid Hadi.
From the post:
We are pleased to announce that data.parliament will be providing data to be used during the Accountability Hack 2014
data.parliament is a platform that enables the sharing of UK Parliament’s data with consumers both within and outside of Parliament. Designed to complement existing data services it aims to be the central publishing platform and data repository for data that is produced by Parliament. Note our release is in Alpha.
It provides both a repository (http://api.data.parliament.uk) for data and a Linked Data API (http://lda.data.parliament.uk). The platform’s ‘shop front’ or data catalogue can be found here (http://data.parliament.uk)
The following datasets and APIs are now available on data.parliament
- Commons Written Parliamentary Questions and Answers
- Lords Written Parliamentary Questions and Answers
- Commons Oral Questions and Question Times
- Early Day Motions
- Lords Divisions
- Commons Divisions
- Commons Members
- Lords Members
- Constituencies
- Briefing Papers
- Papers Laid
A description of the APIs and their usage can be found at http://lda.data.parliament.uk. All the data exposed by the endpoints can be returned in a variety of formats not least JSON.
To get you started the team has coded two publically available demonstrators that make use of the data in data.parliament. The source code for these can found at https://github.com/UKParliData. One of the demonstrators, a client app, can be found working at http://ddpdemo.azurewebsites.net/. Also be sure to read our blog (http://blog.data.parliament.uk) for quick start guides, updates, and news about upcoming datasets.
The data.parliament team will be on hand at the Hack, both participating and networking through the event to gather feedback and ideas..
I don’t know enough about British parliamentary procedure to comment on the completeness of the interface.
I am quite interested in the Briefing Papers data feed:
This dataset contains the data for research briefings produced by the Libraries of the House of Commons and House of Lords and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Each briefing has a pdf document for the briefing itself as well as a set of metadata to accompany it. (http://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset/04)
A great project but even a complete set of documents and transcripts of every word spoken at Parliament does not document relationships between members of Parliment, their relationships to economic interests, etc.
Looking forward to collation of information from this project with other data to form a clearer picture of the legislative process in the UK.
I first saw this in a tweet by data.parliament UK.