Boehner, Cantor want House to use open data formats

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) wrote to the clerk of the House on Friday calling for the chamber's legislative data to be made available in machine-readable formats such as XML.

"We believe that this legislative data, using standardized machine-readable formats, should be publicly available on House websites," the pair wrote to House Clerk Karen Haas. "Ultimately, legislative data is the property of the American public. It is our hope that these reforms will continue to rebuild the trust between Congress and the people we serve."

The shift toward standardized, machine-readable data formats has been under way within the government for a few years now, but progress has been slow. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has moved forward with rules requiring companies to post their financial disclosures in XML format, which uses tags to make documents searchable.

Cantor and Boehner note that the rules of the House adopted on the opening day of this session of Congress directed the Committee on House Administration "to establish and maintain electronic data standards for the House and its committees." They ask the clerk's office to help develop those standards with a goal of moving to open-data formats like XML.

The Obama administration has strongly emphasized the release of government data sets, but transparency advocates have consistently maintained that most of the data provided through sites like Data.gov is not in readily usable formats like XML and therefore not overly useful. The majority of the site's data is geodata suitable mostly for creating maps.