MelanieYami / regulately

Making it easier to understand and influence new government regulations (backend)

regulately back-end

Making it easier to understand and influence new government regulations with Python NLP

A project from the second Debug Politics hackathon in San Francisco. You can see other projects using the regulations.gov API in the regulationsgov organization and their API showcase.

Installing

• Create a virtual environment in the project folder with virtualenv venv
• Activate the virtual environment with source venv/bin/activate (or source venv/Scripts/activate if you're on Windows)
• Install the necessary packages with pip install requirements.txt
• You'll need to create a MongoDB database and save the connection string and database name to a file called external_services.py (in the lib directory). This file will need the globals DATABASE (the name of the mongo database you plan to use) and MONGO_STRING (the connection string you intend to use), i.e.

MONGO_STRING = 'mongodb://<dbuser>:<dbpassword>@ds127958.mlab.com:27958/'
DATABASE = 'regulately'
REG_API_KEY = '<your_regulations_gov_api_key>'
IBMWatson = '<your_watson_api_key>'

Getting a Watson API key

We are using AlchemyLanguageV1 for sentiment analysis of comments on regulations. You can follow the Alchemy Language prerequisites to get an API key and get your development environment set up.