divisions endpoint and address search

[Adam Nekola]

I was sad to discover today that the Sunlight Foundation had ceased supporting their Open Civic Data API. One of its features I found very beneficial was the division search, which accepted lat and long coordinates to return the jurisdictions for a given location. 

See: http://docs.opencivicdata.org/en/latest/api/search.html#division-search

Is is possible to return division data for a particular address/coordinate with the Google Civic Information API? If not, what are the possibilities of this feature existing in the future?

Currently we can only search the jurisdictions (which is still very useful). https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/divisions/search#parameters

Thanks!

[Chetan Sabnis]

Thanks for your question!

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 3:54 PM, Adam Nekola <ane...@gmail.com> wrote:

I was sad to discover today that the Sunlight Foundation had ceased supporting their Open Civic Data API. One of its features I found very beneficial was the division search, which accepted lat and long coordinates to return the jurisdictions for a given location. 

See: http://docs.opencivicdata.org/en/latest/api/search.html#division-search

Is is possible to return division data for a particular address/coordinate with the Google Civic Information API? If not, what are the possibilities of this feature existing in the future?

Yes.  You can use an address in the representativesByAddress query.  It works well, with support for lower-level districts for residential addresses.  For business addresses, you'll typically only get congressional districts, county, and some cities.  You wouldn't get things like state leg districts.

You can specify a lat/lng as well, but accuracy for reverse geocoding will be lower.  Also, I'd expect this to perform closer to the business address case where the congressional, county, and some cities are returned.

 

Currently we can only search the jurisdictions (which is still very useful). https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/divisions/search#parameters

Thanks!

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[Adam Nekola]

Thanks Chetan, your point about business addresses did solve part of the problem for me, but I'm afraid I'm still looking for more.

The Sunlight Foundation API would also provide school districts, in addition to other elected bodies.

EX: ocd-division/country:us/state:il/sldl:7

I can access these via the division search endpoint, but I haven't seen them get returned via representativesByAddress. Here's a result in the division search:

"ocdId": "ocd-division/country:us/state:il/county:will/school_district:valley_view_cusd_365u",

"name": "valley view cusd 365u"

Is there a way to access these in the representativesByAddress endpoint? If not, is there any plan for Google to include these in the future?

For my use case, I don't need who the representatives are – just the divisions representing an address.

[Chetan Sabnis]

Hi Adam,

School districts currently don't perform well for this query.  We have limited information about their boundaries or mappings from addresses through to OCD Division IDs so we aren't able to return these based on an address.  Unfortunately, we don't expect any near-term improvements here.

Chetan

[Carl Hage]

On 05/01/2016 07:17 AM, 'Chetan Sabnis' via Google Civic Information API
wrote:

> School districts currently don't perform well for this query. We have
> limited information about their boundaries or mappings from addresses
> through to OCD Division IDs so we aren't able to return these based on an
> address. Unfortunately, we don't expect any near-term improvements here.

The US Census TIGER database has a pretty good mapping between street
addresses and K-12 school districts (It doesn't have Community College
Districts or County Board of Education, etc., though they usually map to
a set of school districts-- but not known which ones.)

I'm not sure what tools might be available to perform a census lookup.

I presume the difficulty with Civic API is that the voting databases map
one set of street address ranges into precincts where some political
districts are available. But the TIGER database uses another set of
street address ranges. In theory they could be correlated (and also used
for error checks-- there are plenty in both databases), but that is a
significant project on it's own.

Does anyone know of an API that queries the TIGER database that returns
school districts?

[Daniel]

Do you know if there have been any changes in terms of returning state leg and city council division info from representativesByAddress query for business addresses?

Thanks for your question!

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[Robert Baskin]

Hi Daniel,

At this point, nothing has changed from 2016. 

-Rob

Thanks for your question!

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