A decent enough week for us. Not so great for our loyal reader. Some quick notes, delivered as bullet points:
Our Jianhan has added the ability for our procedural steps to have types - business, logic, arithmetic, summation and decision - to the physical ontology in our staging triplestore. He’s also plumbed in the pipes from database to said triple store and data is now flowing without interruption. Librarian Jayne has peered through Postman and everything appears to be as expected. We’ve double checked that the test website for statutory instruments, built by our colleagues in Software Engineering, is pointing at our staging environment. Which it is. Nothing on the test website appears to be broken, which comes as something of a relief. We’re still planning to pick over the SPARQL queries used by Software Engineering to triple check that our move from procedures having route types to procedures having step types will not cause a querying calamity. We remain hopeful.
Librarian Jayne and Michael made a first stab at mapping assorted forms of resolutions in the vicinity of the public bill procedure. Legislation Office Liam was kind enough to mark their supply and appropriation homework. Reader, it did not score highly. Still, first efforts and all that. We live and learn.
Jayne and Michael also spent a pleasant couple of hours adding our made affirmative remedial order map to the machines. The machines, once again, being kind enough to draw back at us. It cannot be said their penmanship improves with time but we appreciate their efforts. Adding legislation citations and checking the data we’ve entered has been entered correctly - it’s something of a mind numbing task and drifting off has been known to happen - are on the ‘to do’ list. There is always more work for next week.
Boss ‘brarian Anya and Michael met with Data Analyst Harrison to chat through all things question and answers related. From questions and answers themselves to tabling and withdrawal to written statements to the impact of parliamentary time and the nature of incumbencies. They hope they made some sense.
Anya and Silver continue to scratch heads over the House of Commons Library’s Subject Specialist Directory in particular and the “single subject view of the Library” work in general. From the noises they’re making we’re not convinced it’s going so well.
Anya and Michael met with the Library’s brand new data scientist Louie to chat about our approach to data collection during general elections. For once, all three were “on prem”, so a whiteboard was commandeered and a Wardley map drawn. The words “value chain” and “commoditisation” may have been used. We apologise to anyone who overheard. More news soon we hope.
Jayne, young Robert and Michael also took to whiteboards to sketch out what they think a future version of the procedure editor application might look like. The current software was written by Wojciech - ex of this parish - and has done sterling service. But as more and more procedures get added, more and more routes get added to those procedures, and more and more work packages result from more and more instruments getting laid, the length of our lists also grows. More and more so. And so we worry at some point the thing will just fall over. Both a new target database schema and a candidate URL pattern for replacing at least half the application were sketched. It only remains to draw up the other half and find someone with time on their hands who’s capable of writing code.
Until next week …
