Sunlight Foundation has developed a new research and notification tool, called Scout, that covers Congress, executive branch regulations and legislation in all 50 states, all based on open data provided by the Federal Register.
“We make our structured data and digital tools available to everyone to freely re-use, and we hope they will create innovative applications,” said Federal Register Managing Editor Michael White. “The Scout beta site looks like a winner, based on our limited testing.”
More from White on how it works:
Suppose your field is labor law, and you are interested in “collective bargaining” issues. A search on FederalRegister.gov for that term will yield more than 200 documents published since 2009.
For a broader reach, you can perform the same search on Scout to include Bills in Congress (via GPO and GovTrack), Speeches in Congress (from the Congressional Record via GPO and Capitol Words), and State Bills (via Open States). After getting search results from Scout, you can easily subscribe to an alert on that topic.
