state of the data: they have been 233 days of plenary (according to published rollcalls) 185 of these have at least one rollcall 69 of these have it published in a computer readable format. After a week of exchange, they are published, but in french, not in english, and two are still missing. After a bit more exchange, the last two missing ones are added
So it turns out that to, for instance, display MEPs only from a single country, you need to, well, have the vote of the mep, and the country of the said mep.
Sounds easy, right? Surely, the EP does give a badge number or some kind of unique identifier that would be used both on for the vote and for the list of meps by country and filtering the list of votes from the polish MEPs would be a 2 min job?
Not so fast, each mep has some kind of unique number. Actually, they have two, one used everywhere (eg list by country) and one for the votes, and they aren't matching. So it's getting slightly more complicated, you need first to build a correspondence between the "regular" identifier and the "vote only" id for each of the MEPs. Surely, it's something that the EP has and is using daily, surely?
Match by name, the hard way Match on lastname, attendnance (that use the normal id) and vote (the secret id)
what's in a name? (The Earl of) Dartmouth
similar names: On the rollcall, 369:Keller Jan,6326 370:Keller Ska,5908
ag keller data/rollcall_name.csv 369:Keller Jan,6326 370:Keller Ska,5908 xavier@kessel:/var/www/mepwatch/parlparse$ ag keller data/attendance_name.csv 355:Jan Keller,124695 732:Ska Keller,96734
matching rollcalls and meps information is a nightmare, eg got married? 6605,124993,Valero 6605,124993,Ceballos
5173,23868,Flašíková Beňová 5173,23868,Beňová 6638,125032,Valcárcel 6638,125032,Valcárcel Siso
matching on name with: 6677,Rodrigues Liliana,for,S&D,92926 6371,Rodrigues Maria João,for,S&D,92926 6649,Rodríguez-Piñero Fernández,for,S&D,92926 6357,Rozière,for,S&D,92926
and you need to take into account the date of the vote too, name isn't enough Wadjid Khan vs Afzal KHAN and matching on names. What is first or last? with Martin Dominique or Simon Peter