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opendata / Open-Data-Needs

An ongoing effort to catalog the holes in the open data ecosystem. [RETIRED]
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Common repository of municipal geodata #4

Open waldoj opened 10 years ago

waldoj commented 10 years ago

There's a lot of municipal-level geodata, but it's scattered around on municipal websites. At a minimum, we need a collection of URLs to download them but, better, we really need a central repository for municipal geodata.

znmeb commented 10 years ago

I'll plus one this - just getting the Oregon election district shapefiles for anything smaller than the TIGER data is a 36-county email-and-phone-call-and-credit-card festival of suck. ;-)

That said, I'm leading a team to do said collection - http://hackoregon.github.io/SpatialDatabase/

dsmorgan77 commented 10 years ago

If they published stuff in a WAF that could be harvested by geoplatform.gov or their catalog sites spit out data.json, we'd be able to get it all in data.gov. There's already a lot of state and municipal stuff in the big data.gov catalog. http://www.geoplatform.gov/publisher-pathway

waldoj commented 10 years ago

Whoa, great project, @znmeb! I'm reading through the GitHub issues now. Thanks for sharing that.

@dsmorgan77, it's my experience that most municipalities aren't anywhere near that advanced. Of those that provide downloadable data—anecdotally—most seem to provide a ZIP file. To be clear, though, what I don't know about municipal geodata is a lot.

iandees commented 10 years ago

I'd love to work on this later! Based on the feedback I got from my initial work for OpenAddresses (https://github.com/openaddresses), there are tons of people interested in this sort of thing.

waldoj commented 10 years ago

Your work on OpenAddresses built a bunch of new connections in my neutral network, @iandees. :) Some of that is reflected in this repository.

waldoj commented 10 years ago

It looks like some of this data might could be harvested from state clearinghouse sites, since at least some of them aggregate municipal-level data.

znmeb commented 10 years ago

I'm in the process of building an inventory of Oregon GIS data. It's a bit scattered - some is at https://github.com/CodeForPortland/project-index/blob/master/data_catalog.md (Links to state and University of Oregon library collections) and some is at https://github.com/hackoregon/ballotpath/blob/master/znmeb/counties.csv

In any event I'm developing scripts as I find stuff, so anyone with PostgreSQL / PostGIS / QGIS should be able to reproduce things assuming links don't break or move.