After months of hard work, we are pleased to announce Jim Mangiafico and Garrett Schure as the winners of the Library of Congress Second Legislative Data Challenge, Legislative XML Data Mapping. As you may remember, we launched this challenge last fall with the goal of advancing the development of international exchange standards for legislative data and identifying potential gaps in the Akoma Ntoso schema. Challenge participants were asked to map existing elements from US and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema for eight specific pieces of US and UK legislation. These selected examples of legislation employed either the US Legislative XML DTD or the UK’s Crown Legislation Markup Language schema.
The judges were faced with a difficult decision in deliberating the challenge submissions due to the high quality of entries submitted. However, the judges felt two of the submissions were of such excellence that they both deserved recognition. In the end, one participant’s work was deemed slightly better than the other’s. In a situation like this, the only logical course of action is to recognize both participants for their hard work and award a second place prize. That is exactly what we did.
First place in the Legislative XML Data Mapping Challenge and a $10,000 prize was awarded to Jim Mangiafico. Mr. Mangiafico’s submission, Akoma Ntoso Converter, impressed the judges the most. The tools Mr. Mangiafico developed (including a Chrome extension) were so refined one judge remarked, “It is a starting point for something and not just a proof of concept.” His mapping eked out only a very narrow win because of his mastery of temporal metadata and his ability to maintain the end of line (<eol/>) designations in UK document mapping.
Second place in the challenge and a $5,000 prize was awarded to Garrett Schure for his submission Translate of U.K. and U.S legislative documents to Akoma Ntoso. The thorough written analysis included in Mr. Schure’s submission as well as his comprehensive use of the organization element within the mapped XML files were unparalleled in the other submissions.
The judges noted that the tools submitted by both participants were very good, and both sets of converted Akoma Ntoso documents included richer Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Resources (<FRBR>) and legal metadata than the other submissions. In addition, both submitters exhibited a good understanding of the complexity of US and UK legislation by maintaining needed elements in both sets of documents.
The judges and the Library want to encourage all participants to continue with their work with legislative and legal documents. You can download Mr. Mangiafico’s tools, Mr. Schure’s solution, or any of the submissions for this challenge from the links available on the Challenge.gov website.
Due to the success of this challenge, the Library and the judges are excited to see what the community does next. We would very much like to recognize the contributions of our colleagues in the US House of Representatives, the OASIS LegalDocML Technical Committee, the UK Parliament, and the UK National Archives. This effort would not have been possible without them.