technical.html

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layout: docs
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<h1>Technical overview</h1>
<p class="section-intro">
  <a href="/">EveryPolitician</a> makes data about politicians
  available in a consistent manner. If you’re a developer who wants
  to write code that consumes that data, this page is for you.
</p>
<h2>The data: CSV or JSON (Popolo)</h2>
<p>
  EveryPolitician publishes the data so you can use it however you want.
  Use it to power your tools, to drive data-based projects, and to help
  people know more about who their politicians are. It’s available to
  download in either <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON">JSON</a> or
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values">CSV</a> formats.
</p>
<p>
  Broadly speaking, we provide the complete, rich data in JSON. We use the <a
  href="http://www.popoloproject.com/">Popolo standard</a> &mdash; if
  you’re a developer that’s great for you because you get every
  detail of the data. The CSV data is simpler &mdash; it’s ideal for
  dropping into a spreadsheet or displaying in a web page.
</p>
<p>
  For example, if someone's name changes during a period (eg. if
  they get married), the later version will be presented as their
  name in the CSV. But if you dive into the JSON data you’re be able
  to see the dates when this new name applied, and what it was
  before. You can think of the JSON as the full data in its raw
  form, and the CSVs as the refined, more pragmatic version.
</p>
<p>
  EveryPolitician doesn’t provide an API for you to query the data
  &mdash; we simply make the whole lot available for download, and if you
  need to be selective about which bits to use, you can do that
  processing at your end.
</p>
<p>
  However, we <em>do</em> slice the CSV data up into separate files
  for each legislative period for a country.  We use these
  "parliamentary terms" because pretty much every legislature in the
  world can be broken down in this way, and applications often only
  really want to know data about the people currently in these
  positions. For many countries we currently only <em>have</em> data
  for the current period, but we‘re very keen to also add older,
  "historic" data too.
</p>

<p>
  Read more about:
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/data_structure.html">the data structure</a></li>
    <li><a href="/repo_structure.html">the repository structure</a></li>
    <li><a href="/data_summary.html">what’s in the data</a></li>
  </ul>
</p>