MyRepresentatives service/API rebranded as geo2gov.com.au and now available for testing
Adam Kennedy
I am happy to report that after much hackery over the last few months,
culminating in a 2 man 30 hour marathon at GovHack, Jeffery and I have
completed the implementation of the core of the new MyRepresentatives
API.
As our works is taking us increasingly away from just the
representatives, we've decided to split this API out as a standalone
entity (separate to any actual web stuff we do).
We've rebranded the standalone API as "geo2gov". There is a shiny new
Amazon EC2 server running the beta code at geo2gov.com.au.
I won't go into too much more detail now, I've got a 20 minute
speaking slot at the weekend hackathon here, and hopefully I can
capture a recording/video of that talk and post it for those who can't
be in Sydney.
The site should be running most of the time between now and the
hackfest, but note that the current deployment in Amazon is not
configured for hot updates, so as I tune and tweak I'll need to drop
the site for about half an hour each time I deploy a new release.
The browser-friendly version of the API is located at http://geo2gov.com.au/html
The pure JSON service is located at http://geo2gov.com.au/json
To make a call for a particular location (for example, a post code)
you can just do the following
http://geo2gov.com.au/json?location=2480
The location param will accept an address, post code, suburb name,
university or other notable place that Google's geocoder knows about,
or a raw "lat,long" location.
For now, I'm leaving the raw Geocoder output in the response for
debugging purposes.
Feedback more than welcome, and I hope to see you all at the hackathon
this weekend.
Adam Kennedy
Andrew Perry
The beginning of lots of exciting things to come!
I'll go and have a play....
Andrew
Alex (Maxious) Sadleir
>
> Ladies and Gentleman
>
> I am happy to report that after much hackery over the last few months,
> culminating in a 2 man 30 hour marathon at GovHack, Jeffery and I have
> completed the implementation of the core of the new MyRepresentatives
> API.
demonstration and was wondering how you could get such give out such
good data (well, geocoding) for free!
I did run into a funny result on my first try - searching for "Barry
Drive" gives me the geo2gov result for the ACT (where I intended) but
the geocoding output notes there's another Barry Drive in Queensland.
What's the best practice for API clients intended to be where there's
multiple geocoding hits (especially if the geocoding output is going
to disappear in the future)? If I get the full address for that QLD
location and run it through again, I get the right result but I think
it should probably give you all the geo2gov data on the first try
(there are only so many "Oxford Street"s in Australia)
Adam Kennedy
The geo2gov application stack is like an iceberg, there's WAY more
code involved in preparing the data than in searching on it.
Currently, the federal maps come from the Australian Election
Commission, the Local Government Boundaries are from the Bureau of
Statistics, the NSW state maps are from the NSW Election Commission
via the lands department, VIC state mapping is from the Victoria
Election Commission, the smaller and/or more mercantile state maps
that don't provide official geo data are from tallyroom.com.au, the
federal member list is from... err... you'd have to ask Jeff that one.
NSW Ward maps come from the Department of Local Government, via
Stephen Lead from NSW Lands Department, and the NSW Mayors are from
the NSW Local Government Association. The state members come from a
private SQLite database brought over from MyReps 1, and assembled from
a variety of places.
The maps of the actual states themselves (used for the senate etc)
from the ABS (although, weirdly, those maps seem to report Canberra as
being in NSW, apparently, and I'm looking into it now).
As far as I am aware, all the data we are using is under various
usable licenses, or will be shortly.
The geo2gov resolution for any point anywhere within a kilometre of a
boundary at any level currently costs around half a second, the
numbers go as low as 0.1 seconds if you hit a nice clear spot with no
boundaries nearby. To resolve the 5-10 different Oxford streets,
you're talking around 5 seconds of CPU.
I'd kind of rather see the additional resolution done before the
geo2gov phase. As for the geocoding, I don't mind leaving that in for
now, since it's clearly useful information.
Adam K
Yuval Ararat
love the response details.
Y.
Daniel Hoolihan
data as well.. (i actually built a qld lga mashup internally for a
project at work, but the data was all sourced from public spaces, so
happy to share)
will be sure to catch up sometime this weekend!
cheers
Daniel
Kat Szuminska
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/legislativeAssembly/members_current.asp
formatted per
http://github.com/openaustralia/openaustralia-parser/blob/master/data/people.csv
Adam Kennedy
to get a better feel for how we're going to want to structure some of
this data.
In particular, we've found the naming of people in government can be
quite tricky, between first, middle, last, prefered, titles,
horourifics, etc etc
A name format that is appropriate as a primary key (I'm using
Preferred_Last_Name), is not necessarily as good for most other uses.
Adam K
Adam Kennedy
Addresses in the ACT currently register as having the NSW Legislative
Council as applicable.
This is due to a bug in our MIF parser, the MIF/MID format doesn't
appear to correctly support inverse areas cut out of a larger area.
This primarily means that we don't support lakes, but unfortunately,
as the ACT is entirely surrounded by NSW, the area that describes the
ACT is not removed out of NSW.
I'm working on a fix to this problem, but you may continue to see the
ACT bug for a week or so.
Adam K