GPO Selects SDL Technology to Digitally Manage and Publish U.S. Congressional Legislation
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.
- 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.
Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) are #OpenGov champions
The Sunlight Foundation recently named Liz Barry and her group at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) as OpenGov Champions. Sunlight highlights these champions for their work and ingenuity in furthering govt transparency. Ms Barry and the PLOTS team is perhaps best known for using kites and helium balloons to map the BP [w:Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill] in 2010, the only high resolution images out in the media at the onset of the catastrophe. PLOTS uses "mapping and other scientific DIY methods to empower local residents and activists to issue their own data sets to better engage with their local governments in environmental and other issues in their communities." Be sure to check out their many maps available in the PLOTS open data archive. And for all of you DIY scientists, you can chip in to the PLOTS DIY spectrometry kit kickstarter campaign and help them build a spectrum-sharing wiki. Congratulations PLOTS!
ProPublica investigation shakes loose TV station public inspection files listing local political programming
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a rule that says that TV stations must keep a list of political ad buys and make it available on request by the public. However, until recently, stations weren't required to post this data on the Internet, and so the only way to get the records was to physically travel to the station in person. However, thanks to ProPublica's Free the Files project -- and especially their Free the Files volunteers!! -- this critical issue has been spotlighted and this summer the FCC passed a rule requiring the stations in the nation's top markets to upload the files to the FCC's website https://stations.fcc.gov/. The system is far from perfect and has a lot of limitations -- eg. there's not a great search! -- but it's a good start. Rachel Maddow highlighted this issue of transparency in political advertising on a recent show:
Ad Hawk: the free app for identifying who’s behind political ads
Thanks Sunlight Foundation for creating Ad Hawk, the smartphone app that identifies political ads as they air and immediately tells you about who is behind them. I'm not so inundated with ads here in CA, but I bet this will be useful for all of our readers who are in swing states.
Good news for census/maps/GIS geeks: TIGERweb set to release
This looks like a great new tool to access geographic data from the US Census Bureau. For more, check out Introduction to TIGERweb (YouTube video below).
The U.S. Census Bureau is going through the final integration tests for the next TIGERweb release. TIGERweb v2.0 (beta) will consist of a new set of map services using American Community Survey (ACS) 2011 source data, an upgraded viewer application based on comments received from our users, and a relocation of our Census 2010 viewer to TIGERweb2010. We hope to release this new version the week of September 17, 2012. Expect more information about this release later this week. If you have any questions or comments about TIGERweb, you may contact us by sending a message to geo.tigerweb@census.gov.