Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Consider switching to Bioguide ID as primary key for legislators #306

Open
GPHemsley opened this issue Mar 26, 2022 · 1 comment
Open

Consider switching to Bioguide ID as primary key for legislators #306

GPHemsley opened this issue Mar 26, 2022 · 1 comment

Comments

@GPHemsley
Copy link
Contributor

Going through unitedstates/congress-legislators, it seems in the olden days there was something of a 3-way tie among bioguide, govtrack, and thomas IDs as primary keys.

Nowadays, though, it seems that most sources have standardized on bioguide. (Indeed, it has been recommended has a primary key for newcomers for a while now.) Thomas no longer exists, having been replaced by Congress.gov, and is thus no longer generating new IDs. Only lis and gpo IDs appear to still be used in most legislative contexts, and even then they tend to be accompanied by bioguide ID.

It might be a worthwhile endeavor to migrate govtrack IDs to bioguide IDs to further standardize and simplify cross-references.

@JoshData
Copy link
Member

Bioguide IDs are not always minted fast enough when there are new legislators.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants