Various Ideas for Improving Office Data

[woodhull]

Hello!

We've started ingesting the office data too and are thinking about ways to make the data work well going forward. We have some ideas that it would be good to get feedback on.

• Adding office IDs. This would perhaps facilitate inter-app communication if anyone ever needs to link to info in another system about offices, and most importantly would facilitate easier data refreshes. Perhaps the ID could be derived from the data? bioguide-city-state plus an optional integer if there ends up being more than one office in a city (this happens in cities like New York) for eg?

• Standardizing the addresses. We could either go for easy to read or USPS standardization, but it seems good to agree on a standard format. Right now there are inconsistencies in Suite abbreviation and a few other oddities.

Do you plan to submit a PR to the upstream united-states repo? It seems like more people would find this data and contribute fixes if it were included upstream. We stumbled across the fact that you were publishing this really randomly.

Anyways, thanks for doing this, and hopefully we can be helpful in keeping the data up to date going forward. Looking forward to collaborating with you.

cc @arrighik @anero @lavaturtle

[TheWalkers]

Thanks for the ideas, makes sense. Upstream is not interested in adding any additional data to their repo.

[tcarobruce]

Adding office IDs.
Merged pull request #13.