US/UK Legislative Data Mapping to Akoma Ntoso

The Library of Congress sponsored a “Legislative Data Challenges” to advance the development of international data exchange standards for legislative data. The goals of this initiative included:

• Enabling wider accessibility and more efficient exchange of the legislative data of the United States Congress and the United Kingdom Parliament;

• Encouraging the development of open standards that facilitate better integration, analysis, and interpretation of legislative data;

• Fostering the use of open source licensing for implementing legislative data standards.

This document details a solution developed by Tanya Braginsky to produce data maps between US bill XML and the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema and UK bill XML and the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema. Gaps or issues identified through this challenge have been documented in detail.

This solution provides accurate, complete and feasible data mapping of the eight legislative documents provided. These included four UK Parliament and four US Congress legislations that were mapped to the XML files based on Akoma Ntoso schema.

Accuracy: the data of all 8 documents was mapped hierarchically, structurally, while preserving all identification information. In accordance with both the original electronic data and the printed data;

Completion: All the data content and attributes that was part of the original UK and US documents are present in the resulting Akoma Ntoso XML files or transformed to the relevant tags/attributes/classes/references according to the logic of the data and printed presentation of the original documents.

Feasibility: This solution completely maps the eight document provided but it does not map the complete schema of the UK Parliament (legislation.xsd) and the US Congress data type definition (bill.dtd, res.dtd and amend.dtd).

The proposed solution however is a solid basis for mapping 100% of the data and to unify the mapping between different legislations data structure definitions.