Population of regulation citations
Purpose of this page: describe how the lists of regulation citations (subparts and sections) get populated in the admin panel for use as metadata for resources.
Note that we sometimes call regulation citations "locations" in our internal admin panel and documentation.
Lists of section and subpart citations:
Option to annotate a resource with regulation citations:
Users with the admin role are allowed to add and edit section and subpart items by hand in the admin panel, but you should not do that, because that tends to introduce inconsistency and duplicates.
Instead, in the admin panel under "Parser Configuration", you can add parts from any title and declare whether our parsers should do one or more of these things with that part:
- Upload the regulation text (so that the part displays in our Table of Contents, people can read it within eRegulations, etc.)
- Upload "locations" (add the subpart and section info to our admin panel, allowing us to associate documents with those locations)
- Upload FR docs (fetch Federal Register rules related to that part and put them into our resources database)
If you just want to populate locations in the admin panel, you can check the box for uploading locations and leave the other aspects alone.
Approximately once a day, our parser fetches data from eCFR. At that time, our system reads the structure of sections and subparts from eCFR, and it makes that information available to the rest of the system in a convenient format (posts it to a supplemental content endpoint).
The system adds all of the subparts to the subpart menu of the admin panel, and it adds all of the sections to the section menu. For all sections that belong to a subpart, it updates each section to be associated with its subpart. Sections that don’t belong to a subpart (such as 42 CFR 431.1 and 42 CFR 433.1) are not tagged with a subpart. If it finds that a section or subpart already exists and is correct, it skips over it.
If there are sections or subparts in the admin panel that didn’t exist in the eCFR data, they remain in the admin panel (they are skipped, not modified). This typically happens if people had added sections with typos, or if there are old sections that aren't in the latest version of the regulations.