Screenscraping the Senate
September 2nd, 2004 | Published in Car Tools, XML
Paul Ford has a new column on XML.com called “Hacking Congress” that aims to create an RDF description of the federal government. His first piece shows how to create an XML file of biographical information about U.S. Senators.
Does creating a Semantic Web of data make it easier to analyze and explore that data in new ways? In addition to testing the Semantic Web concept, if all goes well, I’ll have a nicely organized map of the U.S. government, structured using publicly available ontologies, available in a single, reliable format (RDF), which anyone can incorporate into their own Semantic Web projects. It seems worth trying.