Congress API from NYT

The New York Times has announced a Congress API. This is part of their developer network and they are giving access to their database which is in turn fed by a number of other db's such as the U.S. House and Senate Web sites, THOMAS the Library of Congress Web site and the Bibliographical Directory of the United States Congress.

The database contains House votes since 1991 and Senate votes since 1989. House members are from 1983 and Senate members date back to 1947, thanks to a compilation of data organized by MIT’s Charles Stewart.

At the moment the data returned is:
  • a list of members for a given Congress and chamber,
  • details of a specific roll-call vote,
  • biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress,
  • and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes.
The last is to me the most interesting. Who knows what interesting nuggets may come out of this. I just wish I had more time to play with it. More information can be found here. In addition to the Congress API the NYT also has an Campaign finance API showing who received (declared) what and how it was spent, a community API which relates to NYT's online user interactions with the paper and of course their best seller (books) API.

I am really looking forward to see what kind of apps will come out of these API's.

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