lachie / openaustralia-parser forked from mlandauer/openaustralia-parser

Parser component for Open Australia

This URL has Read+Write access

data/README
This directory contains hand-made data. It was unfortunately more straightforward to build this by hand rather than
writing a parser for it.

members.csv:
Contains the members of the House of Representatives and members of the senate since 1980. This data was originaly 
compiled
from the 41st parliamentary handbook. The members of the house of representatives data was taken from
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/handbook41st/historical/representatives/index.htm
This was manually updated to take in account the 2007 general elections. The senator information was taken from
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/handbook41st/historical/senate/index.htm

ministers.csv:
Contains the periods when particular people were ministers. The data was originally taken from:
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/handbook41st/historical/ministries/59.howard.htm

shadow-ministers.csv:
Contains the periods when particular people were part of the shadow ministry.
Is current as of May 2008 and goes back to 20th March 1996.

postcodes.csv:
From the Australian Bureau of Statistics <http://www.abs.gov.au/>

people.csv:
The "aph_id" field is the id for the person assigned by the aph.gov.au website. This is used looking up members in the 
Hansard.
To find the aph_id for "Tony Abbott", for example, go to Parlinfo Search (http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/) and do a search 
on the
term "tony abbott Dataset:members,allmps". It should return two results. Look at the IDs of the documents. They should 
be
of the form "handbook/members/<ID>" or "handbook/allmps/<ID>".  The last part is the "aph_id".

patches:
Contains patches for the XML files of the Hansard to fix any errors by hand that are too painful or ugly to try to fix 
automatically.