It is with some degree of shame that your regular correspondents are forced to admit they spent a large part of last weekend suffering with moderate to severe hangovers. Which meant another week passed without notes. We would like to assure our regular reader that we’re a little more confident of our sincerity than on previous occasions when we say, “never again”. Guinness permitting. Some quick updates in the form of bullet points:
No progress was made on our bill ontology, though we still encourage you to take a look and let us know what’s missing, misunderstood or just plain wrong. Emails in request of idiot checking are due to be sent.
On the other hand, Librarians Jayne and Claire - accompanied by their trusty computational assistant Michael - have made some decent progress on our public - and possibly hybrid - bill map. We have a brand new map covering motions for leave to bring in a ten minute rule bill, and the start of a map for House of Commons second readings. The ten minute rule bill map is all set to enter the machines. The second reading map needs more time and more thought. Much more time and much more thought.
In other mapping news, we now have both map and data for the proposed draft remedial order procedure. Not content with that, we also have both map and data for the draft affirmative remedial order procedure. Lovely stuff, as we’re sure you’ll agree. We remain somewhat stuck on mapping the made affirmative remedial order procedure. Despite screwing up eyes, pulling our best thinking faces and squinting repeatedly at the legislation, it continues to confound us. Until Journal Office Eve gets back with some sense, we expect to remain none the wiser.
All this mapping would, of course, be to naught, if we were unable to persuade the blasted machines to read the damned things and parse them. Our Jianhan has continued on his quest to rewrite the Ruby code cobbled together by young Robert and Michael into something more traditionally Microsoft-like. Leading to Librarian Jayne and Michael realising they have some work to do to tighten up our map logic. Whilst also, somewhat unfortunately, stumbling over a bug - it would seem our new parsing code is not necessarily parsing all the routes. And certainly not parsing them in the right order. A ticket has been filed and Jianhan has promised to take a look next week.
Jianhan has also been busy patching up our link shortener code. Now, whilst we are not, on the whole, big fans of link shorteners, when they’re link shorteners that we own and that only shorten links on our domain, we make some exceptions. Especially since many of the links we wish to share are to SPARQL queries. Not a technology known for its brevity. Applause Jianhan.
Less successful attempts to massage our code were to be witnessed when young Robert and Michael, perhaps unwisely, attempted to upgrade both the Ruby and the Rails on which our beloved egg timer depends. And everything promptly exploded. Extinguishing the resulting fire with only a wet tea towel and their trusty computational spanners took up the rest of the hour. And then some. Both of our heroes escaped singed only slightly and with most of their pride intact. Imagine, if you will, a pair of Kevin Costners. But shorter. And with half of their eyebrows missing. Nevertheless, they now have a plan. A better one they hope. Let’s see how that goes.
Attempts to transform our process map of House of Lords questions - or at least the ones tabled in expectation of a written answer - into sample data floundered somewhat when we realised we’d somehow forgotten to ever model written statements. So this week, Librarian Anya and Michael were joined by Librarian Emma in some attempt to rectify this omission. With a finger in the air, Emma suggested somewhere upwards of 90% of such statements are duplicated across the two Houses. Now we would be the last people to suggest important aspects of constitutional separation should be ironed out for the good of the computers, but duplication of statements causes so much duplication of effort and exposes so many more holes that things might fall down, well, one does have to wonder. We reached, as we often reach, for our trusty FRBR manual and vaguely suggested the addition of a work-level statement might ease matters considerably. It won’t fly of course. How could it? But worth side-tracking for a little while perhaps.
In less ontological news, Librarians Anya and Ned together with computational colleagues Robert and Michael decanted our geographic area model into our more relational efforts. Michael also spent way too much time clustering our relational model into coherent components before taking out his crayons and colouring everything yellow. Which Anya promptly announced made the whole thing illegible. At least to those with eyes that can see colours. Michael insists there is no problem here and it must be Anya’s eyes at fault.
