Everypolitician::Popolo

EveryPolitician provides its data in Popolo format. If you want to interact with this data from Ruby then this library makes that task simpler.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'everypolitician-popolo'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install everypolitician-popolo

You can download a Popolo file manually from EveryPolitician (although there's another library if you want to automate that). The following example uses Åland Lagting (which is the legislature of the Åland islands, available as JSON data from the EveryPolitician page for Åland).

First you'll need to require the library and read in a file from disk.

require 'everypolitician/popolo'
popolo = Everypolitician::Popolo.read('ep-popolo-v1.0.json')

All Popolo classes used by EveryPolitician are implemented:

• Person
• Organization
• Area
• Event
• Membership

There are methods defined for each property on a class, e.g. for a Person:

popolo.persons.count # => 47
person = popolo.persons.first
person.id # => "e3aab23e-a883-4763-be0d-92e5936024e2"
person.name # => "Aaltonen Carina"
person.image # => "http://www.lagtinget.ax/files/aaltonen_carina.jpg"
person.wikidata # => "Q4934081"

You can also find individual records or collections based on their attributes:

popolo.persons.find_by(name: "Aaltonen Carina")
    # => #<Everypolitician::Popolo::Person:0x0000000237dfc8
    #      @document={:id=>"0c705344-23aa-4fa2-9391-af41c1c775b7",
    #                 :identifiers=>[{:identifier=>"Q4934081", :scheme=>"wikidata"}],
    #                 :name=>"Aaltonen Carina"}>

popolo.organizations.where(classification: "party")
    # => [
    #      <Everypolitician::Popolo::Organization:0x000000035779e0
    #       @document={:classification=>"party",
    #                  :id=>"123",
    #                  :name=>"Sunripe Tomato Party"}>,
    #      <Everypolitician::Popolo::Organization:0x000000035779e1
    #       @document={:classification=>"party",
    #                  :id=>"456",
    #                  :name=>"The Greens"}>
    #    ]

In the example above, the Popolo data comes from a downloaded file (ep-popolo-v1.0.json), which is the kind of file you can get from the EveryPolitician website. But your Ruby application can also interact directly with the EveryPolitician data using the everypolitician-ruby gem, so you don't need to handle JSON files at all. The data the gem returns is in Everypolitician::Popolo format.

require 'everypolitician'

australia = Everypolitician::Index.new.country('Australia')
australia.code # => "AU"
senate = australia.legislature('Senate')
senate.persons.find_by(name: "Aden Ridgeway")

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/everypolitician/everypolitician-popolo.

After you've added a new feature or fixed a bug you should release the gem to rubygems.org.

TravisCI will take care of this for us as long as the release is tagged.

For example, to release to release version 0.12.0:

git tag -a -m "everypolitician-popolo v0.12.0" v0.12.0
git push origin --tags

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.