In an otherwise quiet week in Westminster our beloved first born, the Statutory Instrument tracker stumbled into telly fame when Valerie Vaz gave an approving shout out in the Chamber. Clinking glass Slack emojis were shared, because we can’t afford actual booze. Still, we were pleased. The latest set of releases have improved things dramatically; you can find SIs by laying body or by procedure steps. SIs link to preceding PNSIs, and vice versa. And, whereas before you could only see lists of instruments laid since the service launched, you can now choose to list SIs and PNSIs currently before Parliament, filtering out those that have reached the end of their journey through Parliament. Our upstart child is cool and smart.
Anya, Silver, Robert and Michael were joined on Tuesday by Jenn and Jonathan from the world of Wellcome. Architectures were sketched, domain models chewed over and all things search, browse and discoverability discussed. “The content is the domain model, the website is the domain model, the user journeys are the domain model,” said Jenn. Or words to that effect. And those assembled couldn’t have agreed more. Then they took off to the Strangers’ Bar for a beverage. Or beverages. And things got a little messy. We’ll leave this here.
Following our chats last week, ODI Leigh got back with a report on how to model statistics in the data platform. He recommended we use RDF Data Cube, so our slightly wonky attempt at a stats series model can now be considered binned. Thanks Leigh.
A couple of weeks back, Anya, Robert and Michael got together with Jack and made a first attempt at drawing through the parliamentary procedure for treaties. Michael tweeted a picture which got picked up by Matt, who pointed us in the direction of Arabella, our resident expert on all things treatyish and parliamentary, who volunteered her assistance. Which goes to show, Twitter does still work for some things. Sometimes.
All of which led to Anya, Robert and Michael spending part of Monday morning with Arabella, making a second attempt with their usual boxes and arrows. More things clicked into place and yet nothing became simpler. Some bits of Arabella’s brain are now drawn up and published. Thanks Arabella.
In last week’s thrilling instalment, we mentioned that Anya had managed to persuade the people who publish Future Business to start adding ID attributes to the HTML. Which means librarian Jayne can now link SI tracking business items to the pertinent place. And not to the top of a massive document. Our Jake wrote a javascript bookmarklet to expose the IDs as anchor links against headings and as a table of contents. Which we’re told has made life easier for Jayne. This week Anya and Michael went over to the Print and Publications people to show them Jake’s bookmarklet and ask if they might include similar in their pages so everyone gets the benefit. And it turned out they planned to do just that. They also chatted about whether it would be possible to do the same thing in Votes and Proceedings and were told yes, that will be fine. This is marvellous, because, whilst magazines may be made of pages, the web is definitely made of links.
Everybody being happy with general progress on improving the web, conversation turned to Standing Orders. Anya and Michael would like to give every Standing Order and every sub-paragraph and every sub-sub-paragraph a persistent URI so they can be reliably cited. Not least from things like the procedure data. Michael’s been attempting to parse the published HTML but it’s not heavy on semantics so that’s proving tricky. A joint project was suggested to look at transferring the production of Standing Orders to an XML authoring environment. They’re planning to spend a couple of hours digging into what’s there and attempting to model it out. Both as an XML schema and probably something more domain model like. The meeting concluded with smiles and nods all round. It felt so successful, Anya and Michael decided a beer was in order.
Anya, Robert and Michael ended the week on a high note, when they were reunited with House of Lords Jane and House of Commons Jack, and Christine from the Parliamentary Computational Section. Their mission was to figure out a way to use key steps in a procedure to summarise where in a procedure an instrument is, has been and might be. To make a short story out of the timeline if you will. Because they’re all about the procedural story telling. They wrote up a set of statements and accompanying logic for the proposed negative statutory instrument procedure. This probably still needs some work, but Christine is hoping to prototype something. If she ever gets time off from real work. The same but for other procedures to follow.
Anya and Michael had a pleasant chin wag with Dan, when he dropped by Michael’s office on the Tothill Street sofa. Dan confessed that he’d rather missed the gentle trolling that used to accompany his weeknote appearances. At least they think that’s what he said. The beard gets in the way and he does tend to mumble.
Procedure concluded steps have been added to all five procedures, and librarian Jayne has gone back through the work packages in the system to actualise them where appropriate. This means we can differentiate between ‘current’ work packages and those that have completed their journey through Parliament. New routes have been added to split work packages from ‘current’ work packages, and work packages for a given paper type from ‘current’ work packages for a given paper type. Bex has been busy writing queries and making web pages to match.
Anya and Michael spent Tuesday morning re-examining the routes into concluding steps. They’d been over ambitious in trying to express logic without having any real means to do that. Routes which were causes are now slightly flabbier allows. Until we add logic gates to the model anyway.
Anya, Robert and Michael continued to plough back through the models, tweaking names and comments as they went. There’s not much to see but they hope their future selves will thank them. As they’ve been ticking off models, they’ve been adding them to the interface model. Which, at Robert’s suggestion, now includes owl:imports statements to stitch their teeny tiny, fag-packety models into one huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld. Unfortunately, the software they use to transform their machine-friendly turtle files into people friendly HTML doesn’t seem to do anything with owl:imports. So that’s another thing added to their requirements list for the new parser Robert is writing. More thrillingly, the tool they use to visualise the models seems to do what it’s supposed to do with owl:imports, so the world can now marvel at some blobs and lines being force directed around a screen.
A stroll to the Soho milkshake shop was pencilled in… but, reader, they were too tired to make it. Better things next week you hope.
^ Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes! Use hypertext to make hyperthings people. ^