Posted by
Russell McOrmond-2 on
Jan 31, 2006; 10:10pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/Re-CivicAccess-discuss-Digest-Vol-3-Issue-19-tp201p205.html
Joe Murray wrote:
> Perhaps as a start different webservices could be set up to share
> different pieces of this data being held in different repositories.
I may be alone, but I think webservices projects quickly become more
complex than their utility, when compared to simply sharing data files.
I'm very interested in collaborating on creating references for
publicly available data, as well as data that should be public (but
isn't yet). Having a place (WIKI) to put these references would be great.
I'm also interested in collaborating on extracting data where it can
be extracted (screen scraping, etc) and then made publicly available.
This may be something we'll want to have some level of legal advice on
given I believe that the name of an MP and their email address is a
"fact" and that the government can't claim copyright infringement by us
extracting that data from their publicly accessible websites.
Once I get further on the screen scraping of the new MP information
from parl.gc.ca I'll post about that. Anything I do will be either
public domain or in some Creative Commons license.
I believe MP information is best to key on EDID (Which change from
time to time, the largest recent change being the redrawing of
boundaries in 2003) and election ID (we just had 39e, and there are
other IDs used by elections Canada for by-elections) which will always
be unique.
The parliamentary website seems to have IDs it uses to reference
ridings and MPs, but I can't make any sense out of the numbers and they
don't seem to be consistent on different parts of the site.
--
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <
http://www.flora.ca/>
2415+ Canadians oppose Bill C-60 which protects antiquated Recording,
Movie and "software manufacturing" industries from modernization.
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http://digital-copyright.ca/petition/