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December 6, 2006

XML 2006: XML in Legislation

Timothy Arnold-Moore of SAIC (I think). Good presenter with a sense of humor.

Magna CartaHe points out again that legislation has a shelf life of hundreds of years and so a typical word processing format, which lasts about 10 years, is really not an option. Look! A picture of the Magna Carta to illustrate his point. Bonus points for use of graphics. Even if he did (as I just did) pull it from Wikipedia.

Best practices for legislation:

  • Updates are made to bills from the floor of the legislative chamber and are thus near-instant.
  • Provide information about bill status, proposed amendments, consolidated form of amendments
  • Provide the “as made” versions as soon as enacted
  • Consolidate amendments unofficially. Side note: The US Code takes more than two years for official updates. (ed: That is pathetic.)

Working with legislative XML requires some heavy lifting in revision tracking. Interesting. They have the proposed act in one document and a separate Change Description Document. They integrate the two to produce the amended version(s).

Nice demo of the Tasmanian EnAct system. This presenter is familiar with the concept of “show, don’t tell.” They use an SAIC product, TeraText, as the foundation.