Collapse bill subjects to allow better inter-Congress navigation

[GPHemsley]

Right now, it seems that bill subjects with the same names are separated by Congress by being assigned different IDs.

For example, the subject "Intellectual property" does not bring up all bills related to intellectual property (in fact, it 404s): http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/subjects/intellectual_property

Instead, the subject is separated into different categories based on a Congress-specific ID: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/subjects/intellectual_property/5927 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/subjects/intellectual_property/3260?congress=109

In fact, even the URLs are messy: Without the 'congress' parameter, that second link would return 0 bills. I suppose this extends from the fact that these bill subject pages are treated as searches, but setting the Congress to "All" in the resulting search page box seems to return literally all bills, not just those related to the subject of intellectual property.

[JoshData]

The Library of Congress changed their subjects starting with the 111th Congress. So it's one set of terms from 111th forward, and a different set 110th and before. I'm not sure if they back-updated old bills to the new terms. If not, I'm not sure how much exact-match overlap there is between the terms, except the one you pointed out.

[GPHemsley]

I don't think visitors much care that the LoC changed their category system. And there's no (obvious) way to tell which subjects belong to which system anyway. I would venture to guess that there's more overlap than just the one, since I tried more than I mentioned here.

[JoshData]

I was just explaining why it is like that.

[GPHemsley]

Oh, OK. But still: There's no obvious indication that there is even multiple systems in the first place.

[JoshData]

I'm not disagreeing.