Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Senator Feingold Urges Posting of Constitution Annotated Online
Last week, Senator Feingold sent a letter requesting that the Government Printing Office post the Constitution Annotated online. The Constitution Annotated is a public document, and a great resource on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. It is nominally publicly available, but is online only in a PDF format. The Constitution Annotated contains analysis of 8,000 cases so to be truly useful, it seems obvious it must be searchable.
The GPO can take a simple step toward greater transparency by making this document available to the public in a navigable format. It could also ensure that rather than updating the Constitution Annotated every two years, as is the current practice, updates are posted in real time, as Senator Feingold also requested in his letter.
As Chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee, Senator Feingold gets it. We hope the Government Printing Office gets it too.
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CRS On Making the Constitution Annotated Available in XML
Last week, the Sunlight Foundation urged the Government Printing Office to publish the legal treatise Constitution Annotated (a.k.a. CONAN) online in XML. CONAN explains the U.S. Constitution section by section, describing in its usual (and legally required) non-partisan fashion how the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution’s provisions. CONAN contains analysis of nearly 8,000 Supreme Court cases.
We contacted the Librarian of Congress, who has statutory responsibility for preparing CONAN, for his opinion on making the treatise available online in XML. (Although it is prepared in XML, GPO publishes CONAN online in plain text and PDF format, sans meta-data. As a result, the structured data is unavailable to those who may want to republish, remix, or otherwise engage with the treatise.)
The Congressional Research Service*, which is part of the Library of Congress and whose staff actually write CONAN, made themselves available to answer our questions, summarized below:
(1) Would CRS agree to making the Constitution Annotated available online in XML every two years, when the document is printed?
(2) Would CRS agree making the Constitution Annotated available online in XML as that document is updated and released on Congress’s intranet? (This would be more frequent than the every-other-year publication schedule.)
Here is CRS’s response:
The Congressional Research Service and the Government Printing Office plan to discuss publication of the Constitution Annotated and possible future enhancements.
It is not entirely clear what this means. What we hope is that this statement indicates movement towards an arrangement whereby CRS frequently provides the XML file to GPO on a regular basis, and GPO makes that file — untouched — available for download on its website. Stay tuned.
Thanks to BoingBoing for the coverage.
* Disclosure: I used to work for CRS.
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220+ Years Later, It’s Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML
Today, the Sunlight Foundation called upon the Government Printing Office to publish the legal treatise The Constitution Annotated online in XML format as it is updated. The Constitution Annotated has been written by the Library of Congress for nearly 100 years, and contains analysis of nearly 8,000 U.S. Supreme Court cases.Over the decades, GPO has published print versions of this extraordinary resource every two years, with limited electronic versions available from 1992 edition onward. Although the Library of Congress has drafted the Constitution Annotated in XML for a number of years, that data is no longer present when it is published online by GPO. [Update: To clarify, GPO has never published the XML data. However, CRS currently creates that document in XML format, and has done so for a number of years.] Releasing the treatise in XML would allow for the easy sharing of information between different kinds of computers, applications, and organizations, and provide a roadmap to the underlying data.
In addition to asking for The Constitution Annotated to be published online in XML, we are also asking that as the data is updated and made available to Congressional staff, it also be made available to the general public. For an example of what that could look like, see Cornell University Law School’s transformation of the data.
Today is the 222th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution. In 1787, it was made available to the American people by the most modern technology of the day. We should do no less today, and provide the Constitution (along with commentary) in XML.
The full text of the letter is after the jump. (Continue reading…)
