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THOMAS was the first online database of United States Congress legislative information. A project of the Library of Congress, it was launched in January 1995 at the inception of the 104th Congress and retired on July 5, 2016; it has been superseded by Congress.gov. [1]
The resource was a comprehensive, Internet-accessible source of information on the activities of Congress, including:
The database was named after Thomas Jefferson, who was the third President of the United States. [2] "THOMAS" was an acronym for "The House [of Representatives] Open Multimedia Access System". [3]
The website allowed users to share legislative information via several social networking sites, [4] and there were proposals for an application programming interface. [5]
The Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge [6] in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5,000 prize, [7] and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 [8] to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10,000 prize. [9]
In the law of the United States, the Code of Laws of the United States of America is the official compilation and codification of the general and permanent federal statutes. It contains 53 titles. The main edition is published every six years by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives, and cumulative supplements are published annually. The official version of these laws appears in the United States Statutes at Large, a chronological, uncodified compilation.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.
YAML is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Extensible Markup Language (XML) but has a minimal syntax which intentionally differs from SGML. It uses both Python-style indentation to indicate nesting, and a more compact format that uses [...] for lists and {...} for maps thus JSON files are valid YAML 1.2.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. Operating within the Library of Congress, it works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis. CRS is sometimes known as Congress' think tank due to its broad mandate of providing research and analysis on all matters relevant to national policymaking.
MARCstandards are a set of digital formats for the description of items catalogued by libraries, such as books, DVDs, and digital resources. Computerized library catalogs and library management software need to structure their catalog records as per an industry-wide standard, which is MARC, so that bibliographic information can be shared freely between computers. The structure of bibliographic records almost universally follows the MARC standard. Other standards work in conjunction with MARC, for example, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR)/Resource Description and Access (RDA) provide guidelines on formulating bibliographic data into the MARC record structure, while the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) provides guidelines for displaying MARC records in a standard, human-readable form.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.
Parliamentary informatics is the application of information technology to the documentation of legislative activity. The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about:
The Spry Framework is an open source Ajax framework developed by Adobe Systems which is used in the construction of Rich Internet applications. Unlike other pure JavaScript frameworks such as the Dojo Toolkit and Prototype, Spry is geared towards web designers, not web developers. On August 29, 2012, Adobe announced that it will no longer continue development of Spry and handed it over to the community on GitHub.
Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.
David R.R. Webber is an Information technologist specializing in applications of XML, ebXML and EDI to standards-based information exchanges. He is a senior member of the ACM since 2007. David Webber is one of the originators of the ebXML initiative for global electronic business via the internet. He is holder of two U.S. Patents for electronic information exchange transformation and those patents are now cited widely by 37 other patents. David Webber has implemented several unique groundbreaking computer solutions in his career including the world's first airport gate scheduling system , the SeeMail email client for MCIMail written in Prolog, the patented GoXML system for XMLGlobal, the ShroudIt obfuscation system for LNK Corp, and the VisualScript tool for Smartdraw Inc.
GovTrack.us is a website developed by then-student Joshua Tauberer. It is based in Washington, D.C., and was launched as a hobby. It enables its users to track the bills and members of the United States Congress. Users can add trackers to certain bills, thereby narrowing the scope of the information they receive. The website collects data on members of Congress, allowing users to check members' voting records and attendance relative to their peers. It propagates the ideology of increasing transparency in the government and building better communication between the general public and the government. The website was briefly "on pause" in September 2020 in protest of President Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power regarding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.
Brian A McClendon is an American software executive, engineer, and inventor. He was a co-founder and angel investor in Keyhole, Inc., a geospatial data visualization company that was purchased by Google in 2004 to produce Google Earth. Keyhole itself was spun off from another company called Intrinsic Graphics, of which McClendon was also a co-founder. McClendon was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for strategic, technical, and managerial leadership resulting in widespread accurate and useful geographic information.
Legal XML is a non-profit organization developing in the frame of the OASIS consortium open standards for legal documents, such as electronic court filing, court documents, legal citations, and transcripts, and related applications. The building block for Legal XML standards is eXtensible Markup Language ("XML").
Akoma Ntoso is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and judiciary documents in a structured manner using a domain specific, legal XML vocabulary.
The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 is a bill that would require the United States Department of Justice to collect data from U.S. states and territories about the deaths of prisoners in their custody. States and territories would face monetary penalties for noncompliance. The bill would also require federal agencies to report on the deaths of prisoners in their custody. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 was introduced into the United States House of Representatives during the 113th United States Congress.
LexML Brasil is a project of Brazil's Electronic Government initiative. Its objective is to establish open data systems, integrate work processes and share data, in the context of identifying and structuring executive, legislative and judiciary documents. The LexML-BR standards define a set of simple technology-neutral electronic protocols and representations, based on XML and HTTP ecossistem.
The LexML is a joint initiative of the Civil Law legal system countries seeking to establish open standards for the interchange, identification and structuring of legislative and court information, especially official documents.
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