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Federal Register API/R Package Ideas?

The other day Critical Juncture put up an API for the Federal Register. I thought it would be great if there was a package that could use this API to download data directly into R (much like the excellent WDI package).

This would make it easier to analyse things like:

  • the frequency of regulations issued on a particular issue over a given period of time,

  • the text of the actual regulations.

The nice people over at Critical Juncture tweeted me showing interest in the idea and wondering what would be useful.

I was thinking that in the package there could be commands such as getFedRegister and getMultiFedRegister that would do pretty much do what the API is set up to help now, except download the data into an R object rather than straight to JSON or CSV.

More Ideas?

Any other ideas for things that might be useful? Just leave them in the comments at my Tumblr site.

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