browsing and searching open civic data

Chris Jerdonek

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Apr 5, 2015, 1:51:01 PM4/5/15

to open-ci...@googlegroups.com

Hi,

I'm new to the Open Civic Data Project. I have a basic question that
I didn't see an answer to when browsing the main web site (
http://opencivicdata.org/ ).

Is there a way simply to browse and/or search the current data without
needing to use an API or do a bulk download (e.g. by using a web
site)?

I want to see if certain districts are already added. I manually
poked around in this GitHub repo (
https://github.com/opencivicdata/ocd-division-ids ), but it's not
clear if I'm checking all the right files and whether I'm looking at
the latest version, etc. Also, I did see a couple references to an
"editor and lookup tool" on this page:

http://docs.opencivicdata.org/en/latest/data/introduction.html#finding-your-division-id

But the link is broken ( http://editor.opencivicdata.org/geo/select/ ).

I haven't tried creating a user account, but it doesn't seem like you
should need an account just to view and browse.

Thanks a lot,
--Chris

James Turk

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Apr 13, 2015, 11:10:26 AM4/13/15

to open-civic-data, Paul Tagliamonte

Hi Chris,

Right now there isn't a way to browse the data. If you're looking for districts then ocd-division-ids is the canonical source, anything not on master there hasn't been added.

-James

--

James Turk
Labs Director | Sunlight Foundation
202-558-8723 | @JamesTurk

James McKinney

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Apr 13, 2015, 11:33:22 AM4/13/15

to open-ci...@googlegroups.com, Paul Tagliamonte

For non-US countries, there’s a lookup tool at https://opencivicdata.github.io/ocd-id-viewer/

It takes a while to load the data into client-side storage. The US dataset is too large to load into client-side storage. It wouldn’t be a big job to set up a thin server to offer a similar and faster lookup tool - it’s just no one has done it yet.