For those of you that willl be in Washington DC next week, please consider attending the 2013 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference (RSVP required). There will be several interesting panels with House and external stakeholders like the Sunlight Foundation and the Cornell Legal Information Institute -- including a panel on electronic archiving and one on "missing data" and what to do about it ("missing" meaning not effectively on-line and digital, etc.).

The 2013 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference will take place on Wednesday, May 22, 2013, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium. The conference brings together legislative branch agencies with data users and transparency advocates to discuss the use and future of legislative data. Topics include:

--Electronic legislative archiving
--XML and metadata standards
--Updates on beta.congress.gov

Press Release:

• U.S. Government Printing Office Selects SDL Technology to Digitally Manage and Publish U.S. Congressional Legislation, September 12, 2012 09:32 ET.

  SDL (LSE:SDL), the leading provider of Global Information Management solutions, today announced that one of the world's largest digital information facilities, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has selected SDL to automate the publishing process for printing and accessing select Congressional and Federal agency legislation. GPO provides the three branches of the U.S. federal government with expert publishing and printing services and awarded SDL the Composition System Replacement (CSR) contract following a rigorous search and evaluation process.

  All U.S. Congressional legislation will be published using SDL XML Professional Publisher (XPP™), an automated XML publishing engine for the production of high-volume and complexly formatted publications. SDL XPP software will integrate with GPO's Federal Digital System and be the central point for composition of content for print and online access. SDL XPP replaces a proprietary system that was developed internally but could not scale to support the growth of the GPO.

More here:

• Government Printing Office adopts internal XML system, By Joseph Marks, Government Executive (September 12, 2012).

  The Government Printing Office is adopting a new system that will manage and publish congressional bills and other publications entirely in a pared down and machine-readable XML format, the company providing the system announced Wednesday.

  GPO plans to launch a “proof of concept” for the new system with congressional bills before expanding it to other publications such as the Federal Register and the Congressional Record, Chief Technology Officer Ric Davis told Nextgov.

Eric at Sunlight Foundation Labs reports on a massively improved feed of live updates from the House floor.

• House Revamps Floor Feed, by Eric, Sunlight Labs, (09/27/2011).
• Feed of Live Updates
• XML feed

We're getting closer to the release date for Federal Register 2.0, the Office of the Federal Register's joint project with GPO to take the XML version of the FR and make it into a "newspaper" of regulatory activity.

• National Archives Unveils New Federal Register 2.0 Web Site to Mark 75th Anniversary. Press release (12 July 2010).

According to this press release, the beta version will be released to the public on 26 July 2010, a date chosen to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Federal Register Act. My hope is that this project will set the bar for future uses of XML made available in FDsys, and I'm looking forward to reviewing this initial version at the end of the month.

220 Years Later, It’s Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML, By Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation, (09/17/09).

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.

It is not clear to me who runs this site, but it looks interesting:

• US Government Web Services and XML Data Sources

This site is an attempt to document, in one place and in a uniform manner, the web services and XML data sources that are provided by the US government.

It also has a self-help forum: groups.google.com/group/usgovxml.

As an example, see: Legislative Documents in XML at the United States House of Representatives.

The Senate Rules Committee has instructed the Secretary of the Senate to publish its roll call votes using an XML format. This is a tipping point change!

• Senate to Expand Transparency of Senate Votes, Jim DeMint, May 5, 2009.