propublica / congress-api-docs

Documentation for the ProPublica Congress API
https://projects.propublica.org/api-docs/congress-api/
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API ResponseObject property definitions, specifically 'google_entity_id' #238

Open jpelton-stroud opened 5 years ago

jpelton-stroud commented 5 years ago

Feature Request

Definition list of API Response Object Properties

Started my quest with trying to figure out what the google_entity_id property in the legislator query response references, so if anybody can answer that question for me I'll be satisfied, but ideally every response object should be fully documented, soo...

Issue Description

The docs site doesn't appear provide property descriptions or a definition list for any of the possible API response objects. While many of the properties are self-explanatory (e.g., phone, or bill_id), some are not as easily identified purely by the property's name or a sampling of response data.

Proposed Fix

I'd like to see a page or section outlining the shape of each response object, with some minor information regarding what that property references.

Additional Info

The most I've found so far were some descriptions from the Sunlight Labs docs repo, but parity is not 1-for-1: e.g., Sunlight's documentation doesn't mention google_entity_id at all, and the fec_ids property is described as an array of strings, where every ProPublica response I've sampled so far appears to be a singular string.

dwillis commented 5 years ago

@jpelton-stroud That's a fair request, and we'll be working on it. In the meantime, the google-entity-id is from Google's Knowledge Graph and is the search engine's identifier for prominent individuals. You can, for example, use it in place of a name in Google Trends.

ndawg commented 4 years ago

I feel like this would be accomplished by #198

jpelton-stroud commented 4 years ago

@ndawg agreed.