Accessing resources from data.parliament
In data.parliament data is contained in resources and a resource can belong in one or more datasets. An example of this would be that a briefing paper is a resource, and it belongs to the briefing papers dataset. Each resource that is produced by the UK Parliament is given a unique public URI and this sticks with the data as long as its published.
Atom feeds are available to publicise resources and the URLs for these feeds can be found in our data catalogue .
A full list of datasets available can be accessed though the API here http://api.data.parliament.uk/datasets/feed?take=all
An example of an atom feed for Briefing Papers is http://api.data.parliament.uk/resources/feed?dataset=4
This will bring back a list of resources ordered by the latest published first within that dataset. Resource information is then accessed individually. http://api.data.parliament.uk/resources/50736 will bring back a JSON representation of the resource, what it is and the files associated with it.
For Briefing Papers each resource has an xml and rdf file representation containing the meta data for the briefing paper in addition to the actual paper which is a PDF. All of this information can be retrieved from the resource information. Each individual resource file can also be accessed. So for example, resource 50736 which is a briefing paper, its meta data (authors, summary etc) can be accessed by adding the suffix “.xml” http://api.data.parliament.uk/resources/files/50736.xml and the PDF of the briefing paper can be accessed with the suffix “.pdf”. http://api.data.parliament.uk/resources/files/50736.pdf
9th July 2014 at 1:57 pm
Reply from: Mike Jones
This looks great!
I see people in the Commons with great big pile of paper and frequently think how impenetrable it is to outsiders (and sometime even people within the Westminster bubble!)
My one disappointment is that the machine readable data doesn’t cover everything that’s published. For example, why couldn’t all the text and graphs from the Briefing Papers be included in the xml file? It is only when all the data is released in a machine readable format will people really start being able to use the data in a way that you or I can’t currently imagine – and isn’t that when it gets exciting?
Mike
5th September 2014 at 4:40 pm
Reply from: Zeid Hadi (DDP)
Hi Mike
Apologies for the late reply. We are looking at our datasets – including the ones that feed research papers to make them available onto data.parliament to do just that. We will keep the community posted on how we get on.
Zeid