Louis is a collection of, at present, some 300,000 Federal Government documents, scraped daily from the Government Printing Office website, GPO Access.
This API is a web framework for accessing the collection. Essentially, you can pass filtering parameters to document feeds, and receive results in XML syndication format.
The overall scheme is based on Google's gdata API.
A feed accessing the entire document set:
A feed for each document type:
These feeds return RSS indexes to custom xml documents (as opposed to the primary feed RSS indexes to html documents).
A legislators feed:
Two rollcall vote feeds:
Feeds take parameters in standard http GET ?name=value form.
All feeds support a set of Common Parameters.
See the list of Feeds, above, for links to documentation on additional parameters supported by particular feeds.
All parameters are optional unless noted.
Feeds return xml:
"A GData service must support category queries and alt queries; support for other parameters is optional. Passing a standard parameter not understood by a given service results in a 403 Forbidden response. Passing an unsupported nonstandard parameter results in a 400 Bad Request response."
Send comments, questions, suggestions and bugs to gschure[at]sunlightfoundation.com.
Louis is based on the work of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse.