Information structures in legislative data sources

Every state legislature makes information available over the web. How they do this, though, differs widely. There are also certain practices which are common to most of them. They package a desired change to the state's law as a bill which is written by some subset of legislators, they have certain periods of review of bills within the legislature, they have certain periods of public review of bills, they form committees of legislators to review bills, craft certain bills, and hear public input on bills. But different states may do these things in very different ways and have very different procedures and practices.

The OpenState project is trying to capture data from all the legislatures into a single information source. APIs have been defined for Bills, Legislators, Committees, and for certain Events. Some states provide a very simple views of these entities. Some states provide extremely complex views of them. There is always some mis-match between the OpenStates data structures and what is provided by various states, but the OpenStates data can capture the important concepts in the legislative procedures of almost all of the states. And the structures defined in the OpenStates API are extensible and so extra information can be added to them, even when that information may be available in no other state.