We talked recently to various people interested in providing search over parliamentary data in other Parliaments. One thing that I hope came across when we described search on the site is that search doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive to implement, and certainly shouldn’t be complicated for users.
By keeping our pages simple and [...]
Well, it works for us. We’re writing a pretty straightforward web application – and Rails seems to do those reasonably well. As much as possible, we try to stay within the Rails way.
Rails is ‘web-native’. So is our application. It’s a good fit. Rails makes it easy to write for the web. We care about [...]
We’ve just deployed the most recent build of the application code. We’ve not reparsed the source files or added any new content.
In addition to the usual collection of minor alterations and typos, quite a few back-end imporvements have been made. Highlights include:
Memoizing calculations for better performance
Speeding up the volume index by various methods
Removing some [...]
The Hansard prototype site support OpenSearch: a simple format for sharing search results.
OpenSearch allows our search results to be aggregated and consumed by OpenSearch clients, including sites such as Amazon’s A9.com, the Firefox (version 2 or later) and Internet Explorer (version 7 or later) browsers – and software written with any of the OpenSearch libraries.
We’ve [...]
Not everything that was printed in all those bound volumes of Hansard we set off to get scanned has yet reached the Hansard prototype site.
There are several reasons for this: including the fact that we are actually missing some volumes and we’re tracking them down. Pretty much every time we reparse the whole data set [...]
The Hansard prototype is an experimental project – and not covered by any official requirements for browser support or accessibility.
We do, however, care about that sort of stuff.
Are you having problems accessing and using the site on your combination of hardware, operating system and browser? We’d like to know. We’d like to make the site [...]
Within the text of Hansard, there are some terms that are often used in a manner peculiar to Parliament. Often we have had to choose to use some terms which may not be as clear as we might like. We have to strike a balance between Parliamentary use – and everyday use of a similar [...]
The pages displayed on the Hansard Prototype are generated from XML, which in turn is the result of several OCR systems, taken from scanned images of original printed paper copies of Hansard.
The are typographical errors, OCR errors – and spelling errors introduced at one or more stages in the process or getting from the printed [...]
We’ve been working on the Hansard Prototype in public since January this year (2008). We’ve also run quite a few prototypes within Parliament, that haven’t reached the public web. Most of these prototypes are still running, but certainly not in a state we could release.
We’re going to be working on the Hansard Prototype until the [...]
