Parlmt imports data from www.parliament.uk, specifically Bills & Legislation, Members of Parliament and Members of House of Lords.
This data serves two purposes:
- Interactive Presentation: Visitors can up/down vote and leave comments against Legislation Bills
- JSON Api: Bills, MPs and Lords data is presented in a JSON API
Ruby on Rails 3.x is used as a mostly viewers API layer which presents relevant data in both JSON and XML formats.
All presentation is created by a AngularJS based client.
Although the Parliament website is functional, it is somewhat lacking in interactivity; visitors are not able to voice opinions on Bills nor use them as topics for discussion or discourse.
Parliament.uk presents all its data as HTML. Specific data such as a Bill's details, stages, documents, and most crucially votes and so on can only be extracted by scraping the relevant pages.
This application aims to provide a JSON and XML API for accessing both Bills and Parliamentarian's details.
My nephew (and parlmnt.com co-founder) is a bright kid and I am trying to nudge him to showing at least a passing interest in computing and software development. Several aspects of this application were designed with his feedback.
bundle install --path vendor/bundle
bundle exec rake db:migrateStart parlmnt:
bundle exec rails sThe newly created database will be empty. To populate parlmnt from parliament.uk run:
bundle exec rake import:allThe above should take about an hour to import but the end of the process all Bills, MPs and Lords should have been imported.
- Nazar Aziz. Initial design and developer
- Sunil Taper. Contributing designer