Metadata

[fbennett]

I've put up a screencast that illustrates the use of the MLZ variant of Zotero with OpenCongress.org. I hope that it will prove useful for analyzing and articulating the effects of complex or interlocking legislative changes. For anyone who would like to take the kit out for a spin, I've posted an announcement with installer links to accompany the screencast. Enjoy!

One of the things I had to deal with in assembling the Zotero translator (scraper) for OpenCongress.org was the absence of structured metadata. As mentioned in the announcement, it would be great if some structure could be given to the metadata embedded in the pages at some point. What I would suggest is a minimal-effort approach, just pegging existing blocks with static id attributes in the templates (#title, #date, #description, #session etc.). That would allow third-party tools like Zotero that have adaptive screen-scraping capability to pluck out the cite details independent of the page structure.

(As far as I know there isn't any workable standard for exchange of legal metadata around, so I actually wouldn't push any further than that; but node ids would definitely be helpful.)