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KML shapes of any US state, city, or county, made possible by the U.S. Census
- cageyjames 15y agoThat should appeal the the crowd here, but we've got the data up on our service that can be exported to many other formats, including KML. http://market.weogeo.com/?query=census&lat=37.20852&lon=-97.69416&zoom=3&layers=BT http://market.weogeo.com/?query=census&lat=37.20852&... It is always good though to see governments try and make using their data easier. Quite a shift...
- 5vforest 15y agoHeh, thanks for the link, I had actually seen your site before but wasn't able to find it again. Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but I should make it clear that we're not a government-affiliated entity.
- cageyjames 15y agoGotcha, might have been a little bit of me reading more into it. Awesome stuff still!
- padobson 15y agoHow specific do you get with Voter precincts/districts? The census site has voter districts from 2000 and 2010, but some of those are changed every year. Any applications built to analyze elections data with map overlays require this data, and it's really hard to come up with some 250k voter districts from disparate sources.
- 5vforest 15y agoWhat kind of districts do you need? The CensusShapeConverter can easily be extended to grab any of the data from the Census, which you can browse a list of here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.ht... And yeah, you're on point about redistricting being a complete f'ing headache. Do you know if there's any centralized government source for maps of redistricted precincts?
- padobson 15y agoCentralized? Not any that I know of. Secretaries of State seems to keep shapefiles of their districts, but its never all of them. Check those websites first. Local boards of elections are required to keep some record of the precinct maps on hand, but in many places aren't required to keep past ones - so it is in fact impossible to keep historical GIS data for some counties. There's also a lot of cases where records are simply kept as pencil or pen sketches, and no shapefiles exist. You want to build a majorly disruptive business? Provide brain-dead-simple GIS tools to boards of elections so they can re-draw their own district maps every year. Offer them to software for free, and then resell the data they create to people building campaign tools - or build your own campaign tools and sell those.
- _delirium 15y agoThis is pretty cool; thanks! My existing workflow for this kind of thing (but not down to city level) has been to start with Wikimedia Commons's SVG-ification of the county/state borders (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIPS_and_names.svg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIP...), and then apply appropriate transformations to the SVG file, like shading the counties (tutorial on that at http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-thematic-map-using-free-tools/ http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...). I might continue to use that for quick-and-dirty uses, but proper shapefile data is more flexible, and the city outlines are a very nice addition.
- 5vforest 15y agoHey, thanks for checking it out! And thanks for the Wikimedia link, I had no idea that existed. One of the cool things about this script is that it can be extended to grab any of the data from the Census -- for example, I'm using a less-polished version to grab state legislative districts (both lower and upper houses).
- Duff 15y agoThis is why we need to continue to advocate for open government and open access to data. Weather companies like Accuweather were annoyed by the National Weather Service releasing weather data in KML form -- they saw it as a threat to their lucrative business of selling public domain weather data. Sen. Rick Sanatorum tried to come to the rescue with a bill that would limit their ability to release that data.
- parsnips 15y agoThis is disingenuous, Accuweather is headquartered in College Station, PA... The state that Santorum represented as senator. The owners, employees at Accuweather are his constituents.
- djtriptych 15y agoso... what part is disingenuous?
- parsnips 15y agoThe insinuation that as a Senator, your priority should be supporting open data standards vs representing the constituents you're elected to represent.
- anigbrowl 15y agoYes, you should be doing that. House members can run on bringing home the bacon - though not at the expense of monopolistic policies, in my view. Senate members are supposed to be above such things, in theory, an represent the national interest rather than the provincial one.
- pyre 15y agoIn theory, Senators are supposed to represent the State's interest. Originally, they were appointed by state government rather than elected, IIRC.
- justinph 15y agoThis looks very handy for adding details to the upcoming election results. Thanks!
- philipashlock 15y agoI have a basic app that does this using GeoServer, it's pretty simple and all open source. See http://beta.democracymap.org http://beta.democracymap.org
- 5vforest 15y agoAwesome! Really neat, love the simplicity of it. We're using this for our site, http://www.mygovhub.org http://www.mygovhub.org, which grabs down to the county & local level. (Although we don't have districts at that level, as they'll have to be inputted manually...)
- ck2 15y agoAre zipcode shapes available anywhere? (I noticed google maps now knows zip code shapes)
- 5vforest 15y agoLooks like it: ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/ZCTA5/2010/
- markng 15y agoIt's worth noting that these are approximations of zip code areas, rather than exact zip codes. http://www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html http://www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html - for most reasons, it'll be good enough, though.
- tmcw 15y agoKML, them HTML3 of geospatial formats.
- DiabloD3 15y agoDoesn't D3, the very awesome data graphing toolkit for JS, already use Census data for its map stuff?
- baconner 15y agoI don't think d3 or protovis explicitly pack any actual map data as part of the framework, no. But you could certainly make use of the kml with d3 to produce maps.
- malandrew 15y agoI know this comes from US Government data, but do you have any plans to add neighborhood KML shapes for major cities?