New API: Electoral districts

[Michael Mulley]

I'm happy to announce a new API to match a Canadian address to its political districts.

At the moment it handles federal ridings, provincial ridings for all provinces save PEI (who've been quite helpful, and should be in soon) and Nova Scotia, and a handful of municipalities.

It's part of vote.ca, a new site I did the coding on that's a prototype of a general-purpose polling-place locator.

See http://vote.ca/api/ for docs.

michael

[Andy Kaplan-Myrth]

Awesome work, Michael! Congratulations!!

--
Andy Kaplan-Myrth, M.A., LL.B.
-------------------------------------------------------
email: an...@kaplan-myrth.ca
web: http://kaplan-myrth.ca
blog: http://blog.kaplan-myrth.ca
-------------------------------------------------------

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VisibleGovernment Discuss" group.
To post to this group, send email to visiblegover...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to visiblegovernment-...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/visiblegovernment-discuss?hl=en.

[David Eaves]

Michael,

Congratulations, this is fantastic. 

--

www.eaves.ca

@daeaves

Sent from my iPhone

--

[Michael Allan]

Apparantly Google has started to code a similar API:
http://electioncenter.googlelabs.com/api.html

They don't have much to show, yet. I think you're probably ahead of
them. Would it be worthwhile coordinating, do you think?

Here's their list:
http://groups.google.com/group/election-center-api-users

--
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/

[Jennifer Bell]

Good job getting that info from the provinces, Micheal. Really, that
sort of API would be useful down to the local level. I vaguely
remember Steven Clift proposed a wiki repository of municipality
boundaries & representatives this summer on CityCamp Exchange, I
think. I was going to go dig up info on that, but it looks like
google might have usurped it...

Riffing on the idea of a local boundary repository, it would be
awesome if it were able to incorporate volunteer boundary drawing on
open street maps (as Sylvain suggested last year). With FixMyStreet
I've found that a lot of smaller regions don't have good access to
their own maps -- they're treated as mysterious things produced by
contractors, and often come with complicated licensing.

It would also be neat to see political boundaries and representatives
coded on wikipedia as part of their standard formats for places and
elections.

Jennifer

On Sep 28, 12:23 am, Michael Allan <m...@zelea.com> wrote:
> Apparantly Google has started to code a similar API:http://electioncenter.googlelabs.com/api.html
>
> They don't have much to show, yet. I think you're probably ahead of
> them.  Would it be worthwhile coordinating, do you think?
>
> Here's their list:http://groups.google.com/group/election-center-api-users
>
> --
> Michael Allan
>

> Toronto, +1 647-436-4521http://zelea.com/

[Joe Murray]

Toronto Open Data provides its ward boundaries: see http://www.toronto.ca/open/datasets/web-map-services/

Joe Murray, PhD
President, JMA Consulting
joe.m...@jmaconsulting.biz
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
416.466.1281

>
> > michael

[Michael Mulley]

A wiki for boundary files would still be a great idea. Most of the data is actually online somewhere or other -- I think it was only Manitoba and Newfoundland where someone had to e-mail me the files directly -- but collecting things in one place, and normalizing some of the gnarlier data sets, would be very nice. 

I hadn't seen the Google thing before, but it's certainly interesting. They're aiming to provide full polling-place information. (The main vote.ca site does some of that, but the API is restricted to identifying districts.) I'm using geospatial data (polygons on a map), whereas they require full mappings of addresses to electoral districts and subdivisions: 4-26 Esplanade are in subdivision 21.4 and vote at St. Joseph Elementary. That level of data is necessary if you want to give people their polling places with full accuracy, but it's also quite a bit harder to get and deal with. If someone has the clout to get that from lots of municipalities, though, it's Google, and I hope they pull it off.

Re coding boundaries and representatives on Wikipedia, the place to do that is probably Freebase (which is built on top of Wikipedia data). I've been meaning to take a stab at that for a while.

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Jennifer Bell <visibleg...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > michael