With summer recess upon us and people heading off on their well-deserved holidays, our dear reader will be delighted to learn this looks set to be a fairly short set of notes. Though we have said that before, and then look what happened. In all honesty, not much of interest has happened. If you tuned in last time out, you’ll know that both our crack team of librarians and computation ‘experts’ have been pulling hard on their oars as we attempt to sail to the bright horizon of a thesaurus management system that’s actually supported. That work remains ongoing.
On software update duties, we find our Jianhan and Developer Jon joined this week by everyone’s favourite Joe, Computational Institutional Memory Joe, and, Joe’s colleague, Liya. Jianhan has been busy plugging together backend pipes, Jon has been adapting his search code to cope with changes, and Joe and Liya have been lending a hand reconfiguring applications that lie just outside our team’s purview. Over on the Librarian side, Librarians Anna, Jayne, Ned and Phil have all been busy testing.
Not that that’s all that Jon has been doing. He’s also been responding to cards raised by assorted librarians and placing them back on the testing pile. He even found time to have a wee fiddle with our GitHub settings and finally got a pipeline for Heroku review apps in place. Which should make his life much simpler. Going forward, as Young Robert might add.
In the backend of the backend of our search service, Librarians Emily and Jayne have been testing our first attempt at a Data Graphs implementation of OASiS. A meeting has been pencilled in with boss-brarian Anya and computational pixel-fiddler Michael to discuss issues found. Once those have been put back to bed, it will be time to try a data load, and, when that’s done, yet more testing beckons. Always with the testing.
In more procedure orientated news, we had a number of views that we’d wanted to add to our Procedure Browsable Space™ that proved impossible because our aged triplestore got rather tired and fell asleep halfway through responding to requests. We know the feeling. Librarian Jayne informs us she’s now experimenting with a new approach to SPARQL negation, which promises to be much less tiring for the old triplestore. She’s already managed to fix the listing of work packages before Parliament for a given step collection, which had been crashing rather badly. And now isn’t.
Elsewhere, Michael has taken Jayne’s steps in a procedure and routes in a procedure queries, cobbled the two together, and churned out a DOT file representation of our procedure maps. In order to give those files a home, there is - or will be - a new URL under a procedure called /map. Since that went live, Young Robert has taken over the controls and is currently wrangling the DOT files with a dash of D3, hoping to turn them into something presentable. Let’s see how that goes.
Sticking with Jayne and her exemplary SPARQL skills, she’s recently compiled a new query for the statutory instruments search service and dispatched that to colleagues in the Parliamentary Computational Section. The old query had been tripping up over “smart quotes”, which, given the preponderance of Microsoft productivity software across the public sector, is not a thing you want to find yourself tripping over. Said colleagues have now deployed that fix and our statutory instrument search is back working. We’re hoping the same can be said of our treaty tracking website shortly.
In procedure adjacent news, Librarian Jayne and her computational easy riders, Young Robert and Michael, have finally finished refactoring the code behind the end date calculations on our beloved Egg Timer™. Whole chunks of redundant code getting chipped away as a result. Which can only ever be a good thing. The world needs no more code than absolutely necessary. As ever, the code is heavily commented, the comments are in Markdown, and the Markdown is parsed to HTML. Why not treat your eyeballs and check our logic.
With start date and end date calculations now considered clean, we’re about embark on the third and final stage of our long-running Egg Timer™ refactoring exploits. This time tackling the calculator controller that sits at the heart of everything. It’s hard to believe now, but it did start life as a fairly small and fairly sensible bit of code. Over time and under development, both small and sensible have become less true. Unfortunately, turning what is there now into something more sane is quite beyond Michael’s limited computational skills, so Developer Jon has been dragged in to lend a more professional hand. More news soon.
In Member management land, there was the small matter of a machinery of government change to deal with. Two government departments waving bye-bye, DCMS getting its Digital back, and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade being born anew. Since the pipes between MNIS and our procedural triplestore stopped flowing some time back, our Jianhan was kind enough to ensure that the changes happened in procedure world too.
Turning to matters psephological, we have our first CSV files being output from the new Election Manager application. These being almost - but not quite - to the specification agreed between Louie and Michael last time we put pen to paper. A handful of changes have been requested and a handful of additions applied for. Until then, efforts to rewrite import scripts to the election results database remain on hold.
No week would be complete without a spot of Librarian spring cleaning and this week is no different. It was discovered that 1,400 search records originating from select committees did not have the select committee in question assigned as their corporate author. Librarian Ayesha has made a start on fixing these and can confidently state that records falling between 2018 and 2026, are now associated with their appropriate committee. She’s also made a start on earlier records and intends to complete the task all the way back to 1986. Fine librarianing, Librarian Ayesha.
And finally, we fully expect the weather to finally break as our crack team of indexing librarians head off on their summer vacations. Librarian Bosede, Librarian Kirsty, Librarian Jayshree, Librarian Deanne, Librarian Jason, Librarian Josh and boss ‘brarian Steve certainly deserve to put their feet up, having pored over a record breaking 22,734 written parliamentary questions tabled since the start of this session. Expertly indexing them all. Have an ice cream and a paddle on us, librarians.