How do you get your data?

[Daniel McDonald]

I've recently had the need to keep a geo database of legislative districts for our project.  I found legislative district boundary information from the US Census Bureau, which came in TIGER/shape files, and converted it to Sql Server Geography types (we're a .net shop).

After doing some tests to determine our accuracy, it appears that some addresses along the boundary lines between two districts are being attributed to the wrong district.  I've been verifying those addresses with your site and the legislative lookup tool for Washington state (http://app.leg.wa.gov/DistrictFinder/).  So far, it seems that my data is the odd ball, and both other sources are the same.

From what I can tell, you store your data as simple polygons with the coordinate system being offset to accommodate a 1:1 mapping with the latitude and longitude values, so there's no conversion needed.  I'm assuming you're using the same Census data that I pulled (the 113th CD dataset), and the main difference being my conversion from the flat polygon types to the geography types.  Did you have to do any conversions to the raw data you pulled from the Census Bureau?  If so, what was it, and how did you accomplish it?

Your API is really quite nice, and I'll probably end up pulling out all of our in-house data and connecting to your web services instead.  Nice work, guys!

[Mario Olivio Flores]

Hi Daniel, 

Sorry we didn't get back to you from your old question.  Let me know if there are still any questions I can answer for you. 

-Mario