My, how time flies. Another two weeks ticked off our working lifespans with not much to show for our efforts. Not that we’ve been slacking on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s just a lot of plates spinning and nothing quite making it to completion. Here’s where we’re at and what we’ve been trying to do.
Efforts to upgrade our thesaurus management service remain blocked as the vendor works on convincing their computers to add one to a number. Finding himself at something of a loose end, our Jianhan has been busying himself with squishing a variety of bugs in our Indexing Application. Some of which have been hanging around for the best part of a decade.
Skipping neatly between triplestores, Jianhan has also applied his ontological spanner to ensure that the Government Equalities Office, the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Duchy of Lancaster Office are all now typed as government departments. Which, for some reason, they weren’t.
Meanwhile, developer Andy has been decommissioning components from our first attempt to build yet another new Open Data Platform. Thereby saving the body corporate a deal of money. Details to follow when we next submit our annual accounts. He’s also been working with Sadia to upgrade assorted bits of software in the data.parliament.uk stack. Like painting the Forth Bridge and finding yourself with enough spare paint to also tackle the Royal Albert and the Clifton Suspension. Just endless.
If anyone’s had a productive fortnight it has to be boss ‘brarian Anya and computational whizzkid Jon. Anya’s been busy defining aliases for new, old Parliamentary Search. Jon has been busy implementing them. At some point in the not too distant, we aim to have a page on the beta search website, listing all the aliases and explaining what they do. But, for now, the changes are only apparent for those with a working knowledge of existing aliases and the wherewithal to type them into the search box. Bear with us.
On our last but one outing, we were pleased to report that our Library Knowledge Base™ was finally ready to meet researcher eyeballs. Eyeball meeting has now happened and feedback has flooded in. As expected, most of that feedback relates to the shape of the thesaurus that underpins everything. To that end, Librarians Susannah and Ned have set off on a tidying mission adding alternative labels, removing alternative labels, and deprecating concepts as appropriate. Responding to feedback on matters outside the thesaurus have split in two directions: the simpler, pixel-tidying duties picked up by Young Robert and Michael, the more thorny issues around transitivity landing in the lap of Shedcode James. A division of labour reflective of respective skill levels.
Sticking with James, he’s also been on a bit of a tidying mission, updating Ruby, updating Rails, updating dependencies, and shifting all our applications over to the latest and greatest Heroku stack. Thank you James.
It’s all been a little quiet in procedural map making land of late, but not this week. The recent arrival of the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee necessitated an update or two, that committee being likely to take an interest in matters pertaining to proposed negative statutory instruments, legislative reform orders and treaties. So that’s four maps that needed their pixels and bits tweaked. This week also saw the European Affairs Committee hold its first ever oral evidence session on the matter of a treaty. In this case the Agreement, done at Brussels on 14 July 2026, in respect of Gibraltar between the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community of the one part, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the other part. To cope with that, our treaty procedure map has gained a whole new step, the results of which pops up on that treaty’s procedural timeline here.
At the top end of our procedural value chain, our Procedure Browsable Space™ continues to get its pixels polished. In recent weeks, work packages gained a new view, that view listing links to documents considered pertinent to a well-informed debate. The first iteration was all a little hard-coded, any updates to the data also requiring a tweak to the controller code before any changes could be seen on the pages. Our dear reader will no doubt be aware that this is not our way. Not our way at all. Not to sound dogmatic, but we aim to have as little code between the data and the eyeballs as possible. The only job the code should be doing is grabbing the data and serialising it as appropriate. After all, one would never wish to insert a code monkey between a librarian and her audience. For that reason, Librarian Jayne has crafted a new SPARQL query, the controller code has been much simplified, and what appears on the website is now entirely in the hands of Jayne and team. Much better.
Still with Jayne and still with SPARQL, she’s also started to refactor the queries used by other pages in our Procedure Browsable Space™. This to add comments, standardise the names of properties returned, apply appropriate indentation, and generally make them more legible to experienced SPARQLheads and newbies alike. For proof of work, please take a look inside the SPARQL queries details element on any of the pages under calculation styles. If you do that, you’ll also notice each query now links to our SPARQL endpoint, so you can tweak the query at will. Just because not everyone wishes to lift the bonnet shouldn’t mean that nobody can.
At the bottom end of the value chain, nine years of procedural data has been decanted from our Procedure Editor database and into Data Graphs. This took a wee while longer and a good deal more SQL than we’d first imagined. Rather neat though.
Off in another Data Graphs project, Librarian Emily has been attempting to create a new and more sustainable home for OaSIS. This week she’s mostly been on model tweaking duties, the date on a bill certification now being mandatory, any and all links to organisations having their optionality flag flipped in the opposite direction.
Psephologically speaking, Data Scientist Louie and computational bob-a-job-boy Michael have agreed on a spec for the data we need to export from the new Election Manager application in order to populate by-elections on the election results website. More import rake tasks will need to be written. Or at least adapted. Louie has also supplied Michael with a new set of general election GeoJSON files. This is because he’s putting together a plan to replace general election hex maps with something a little more flexible and a little more lightweight. More news soon, we hope.
Over in Member management corner, team:Phil have put the finishing touches to the recent government reshuffle, that task also encompassing changes made to the ranks of His Majesty’s Official Opposition. The process slowed a little by a considerable gap between announcement and publication.
In previous outings, we’ve reported on the exploits of Librarians Emma and Josh, who’ve been putting their shoulders to the wheel of legislative data, ensuring that all Acts of Parliament link to the expression of their preceding bill. And that that expression links to the preceding version and so on and so forth. This week Librarian Ayesha picked up the baton, covering off all Acts gaining Royal Assent between 1996 and 1998. Splendid.
And finally, Librarian Martin has turned his expert eye to the world of statutory instruments, ensuring that all SIs link to any ensuing debate and vice versa. That work covering off 1989 to 1998. Onwards!
Outside work, Data Scientist Louie, together with computational Littlest Hoboes Young Robert and Michael, set off on an adventure across West London, unencumbered by adult supervision. Somewhere just south of Oxford Street, they rendezvoused with SQL Neurotic Rachel - ex of this parish - and headed into The Photographers’ Gallery to listen to a series of talks on the internet we used to have. Before everything went so horribly wrong. Should you be due to meet Robert and Michael for one of their whiteboarding sessions, please be aware they’ve taken to calling it their “diagramming practice”. “Situated at the intersection of virtual spaces and physical infrastructure”, they tell us. “A lot to unpack”, adds Louie.