Legislative Documents in XML at the United States House of Representatives

Under the direction of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and the House Committee on Administration, the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House have collaborated with the Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office to enable the creation of legislative documents using XML (http://xml.house.gov/ ).

http://www.house.gov/house/Tying_it_all.shtml , http://www.gpoaccess.gov/bills/glossary.html#definitions

House legislative documents in xml format require that you know the bill or resolution number as well as the congress number in which the bill was introduced. With those two pieces of data, you can retrieve a document from its URL as per the following table:

Document	ID	URL
Bill	H.R.XXXX	http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlcYYYY/hXXXX_ih.xml
Concurrent Resolution	H.Con.Res.XXXX	http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlcYYYY/hcXXXX_ih.xml
Joint Resolution	H.J.Res.XXXX	http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlcYYYY/hjXXXX_ih.xml
Simple Resolution	H.Res.XXXX	http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlcYYYY/hrXXXX_ih.xml

Where:
    XXXX is the bill or resolution number
    YYYY is the congress number i.e. 108, 109, 110, etc.

Note: The suffix _ih refers to the version of the bill. See http://www.gpoaccess.gov/bills/glossary.html#definitions

Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov ) has implemented Legislative Handles (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/handles/help.html ) to minimize the impact on search engines, databases, etc. when URLs of indexed documents change. Handles are web addresses that do not change over time. With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.

Operation	Description
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