Resources linking system
For reference for the team. See also: structure and content of resources, which should get consolidated into this page.
Each resource has an item ID (assigned by the system) and some combination of the following aspects:
- Date [can be year, year + month, or year + month + day, such as "2021-10-18"]
- Document ID [identifier, such as "SHO # 21-005"]
- Title [usually a document title, such as "Re: Medicaid Eligibility for COFA Migrants"]
- Category or Subcategory [such as "State Health Official (SHO) Letter"] See Categorizing resources for more about how these work
- URL (or filename for internal files)
- Extract_URL - this is a hidden field that is only populated for post-1994 Federal Register links, to support searching those documents
- Subjects
- Regulation citations [section or subpart info, such as "42 435.4", "42 435.907", etc.]
- Statute citations
- Editor notes (only shown in the admin panel)
- Approval status
Internal links and files also have:
- Summary
- Coming soon: Visibility status
Federal Register links also have:
- Document number
- Docket numbers
- Groups
- Action type
- Correction status
- Withdrawal status
- A Category that defaults to "Proposed and Final Rules"
As shown on a subject page:
See Feature: repository search for display on search results.
On regulation sidebars, categories display a list of subcategories that belong to the category, then a list of items that belong to the category. Subcategories contain items.
This includes all public documents except FR documents, such as links to related statutes, subregulatory guidance, technical assistance documents, etc.
SMEs enter all of this information by hand. For determining how to associate related regulation citations, they use our criteria whitepaper as a guide (also linked on the live site for reader review).
Our system automatically pulls in new documents via the FederalRegister.gov API, including automatically populating the "locations" list (associated sections and subparts). New documents are automatically marked "approved", since the parser does a good job at importing accurate info for new documents.
By default, we only pull in documents that are marked in the FR doc metadata as associated with our parts in scope. So, for example, if a FR doc is only related to 42 CFR 413, we won't pull it in, since that's not a part in our scope. (See "Configuration of subpart and section info" below for more details.)
Our system groups FR documents as described in this page.
The FR API includes most CMS FR documents from present to 1994. Many of its records for items in the 1990s are incomplete, so we manually corrected them in our database, such as by adding missing locations. We also corrected a lot of the "groups" by hand.
We manually entered all the documents in our database dated before 1994, including locations.
This is meant for links to Box, SharePoint, etc. These are entered by hand.
These are entered by hand.
This applies to lists that are not sorted by relevance (not search results), such as sidebars and subject pages.
Special case: in sidebars and on the homepage, Federal Register documents are sorted into "groups" to help people find related rules - see Federal Register link grouping.
Default sort order for content items in general:
- All items with dates are sorted in reverse-chronological order (most recent first) by date.
- If multiple items have the same date, use the next step to order.
- Then all items without dates but with document IDs are sorted in alphanumeric order by Document ID. (For an example of alphanumeric order, see call numbers in a library.)
- If multiple items have the same document ID, use the next step to order.
- Then all items without dates or document IDs are sorted in alphanumeric order by title.
- If multiple items have the same title, sort them in any order. Doesn't matter at that point.