Today the House of Representatives promulgated standards on how to electronically name a broad range of legislative documents, from bills to amendments to committee reports to individual legislators. Combined with the recently launched transparency portal docs.house.gov, important legislative information can now be automatically and uniquely identified by computers and retrieved at permanent URLs, with more data to come online in 2013. The public release of these standards will help ensure that third parties have a common vocabulary to describe the same document, which will make data sharing much easier.
This is the latest in a series of steps by the House of Representatives to give the public better access to legislative information. The document was released by the Committee on House Administration, which is responsible for the promulgation of technology standards to make the House more open and transparent.