Below are resources useful in conducting E-Rulemaking research.  The initial research effort is centered around a set of about 22,000 public comments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Organic Program (NOP). This is a small subset of the 277,000 comments that were received for a single proposed regulation in 1998. We expect to begin working with additional, and larger, datasets during the summer of 2003.

• E-Rulemaking Dataset 
• noppr_web_comments_v1.tar.gz: (8,235,706 bytes gzipped, 43,161,600 bytes uncompressed): 
• Description: collection of 20, 936 public comments on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Organic Program (NOP).  Courtesy of Stuart Shulman.
• Publication: S. Shulman. "Citizen agenda-setting, digital government, and the National Organic Program." American Political Science Association, 2000.

• National Organic Program, 1997 Proposed Rule
•  NOP_proposed_rule_part1.pdf, NOP_proposed_rule_part2.pdf:
• Description: original rules proposed by the USDA to establish a NOP under the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990.  This is the proposed rule that the comments in the E-Rulemaking Dataset are referring to.
• Publication: Federal Register Online via GPO Access.   

• Lemur Toolkit for Language Modeling and Information Retrieval
• The Lemur Toolkit is designed to facilitate research in language modeling and information retrieval, where IR is broadly interpreted to include such technologies as ad hoc and distributed retrieval, cross-language IR, summarization, filtering, and classification.

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Updated on April 19, 2003.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~callan/