THOMAS was the first online database of United States Congress legislative information. A project of the Library of Congress, it was launched in January 1995 at the inception of the 104th Congress and retired on July 5, 2016; it has been superseded by Congress.gov.
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The resource was a comprehensive, Internet-accessible source of information on the activities of Congress, including:
The database was named after Thomas Jefferson, who was the third President of the United States. According to some sources, "THOMAS" is an acronym for "The House [of Representatives] Open Multimedia Access System", but as of November 2006 this text was not apparent anywhere on its site; this explanation might be a backronym.
The website allowed users to share legislative information via several social networking sites, and there were proposals for an application programming interface.
Library of Congress Legislative Data Challenge
The Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5,000 prize, and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10,000 prize.