
KML shapes of any US state, city, or county, made possible by the U.S. Census - 5vforest
https://github.com/GovHubOrg/CensusShapeConverter
======
_delirium
This 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_FIP...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIPS_and_names.svg)),
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-th...](http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-
thematic-map-using-free-tools/)). 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
Hey, 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).

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Duff
This 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
This 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
so... what part is disingenuous?

~~~
parsnips
The insinuation that as a Senator, your priority should be supporting open
data standards vs representing the constituents you're elected to represent.

~~~
Klinky
You know there are 12,000,000+ people in PA, the entire state is not employed
by AccuWeather.

~~~
parsnips
12,000,000 people who are building competitor weather services using public
domain data? Less than 1% of the populace there probably knows they can get
public domain data, let alone build a weather competitor business... which is
really what the OP was complaining about.

~~~
baconner
No, 120,000,000 people who might benefit from apps built by others on the open
data.

It is good IMO for a rep to fight for legislation that helps local businesses
when that action serves his constituents as a group over the long term.

That's not the case here because what Santorum did is attempt to artificially
block competition in a space where competition is likely to benefit all of his
constituents in the long term. It's selling out the majority for the sake of
one small business and creating a wasteful bit of government that small gov
types like Santorum ought to be fighting against. It's creating a barrier to
free market completion for the sake of a small win for one small company.

~~~
stinkytaco
One could argue that a taxpayer subsidized weather service kills private
competition. How do you compete with free?

Of course, all those arguments miss the point. The weather service is an
important function of the government, we shouldn't _have_ to pay for weather.
It's a matter of public safety and information, the property of the commons,
not some commodity. Protecting that is the reason we have a government, not to
artificially support a Senator's local business.

~~~
baconner
I completely agree with your reasoning on why weather data is public data. Its
actually not an argument about business at all but one of the public interest.

To expand on you reasoning a bit I think there is a general test we can apply
to all government data collection and publishing practices. If the data is
being collected then its been determined to be in the public's interest to do
so and therefore it's also in the public interest to release it freely in a
reasonably accessible format. If the set is not useful then releasing it
serves to at least inform citizens that we're wasting money so we can exert
pressure to stop collecting the useless set.

The exception of course is gov data that may have privacy or security
implications but nevertheless eventually it should be released when those
concerns are no longer valid.

------
cageyjames
That 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&...](http://market.weogeo.com/?query=census&lat=37.20852&lon=-97.69416&zoom=3&layers=BT)

It is always good though to see governments try and make using their data
easier. Quite a shift...

~~~
padobson
How 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
What 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.ht...](http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html)

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
Centralized? 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.

------
ck2
Are zipcode shapes available anywhere?

(I noticed google maps now knows zip code shapes)

~~~
5vforest
Looks like it: ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/ZCTA5/2010/

~~~
markng
It's worth noting that these are approximations of zip code areas, rather than
exact zip codes. <http://www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html> \- for most
reasons, it'll be good enough, though.

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philipashlock
I have a basic app that does this using GeoServer, it's pretty simple and all
open source. See <http://beta.democracymap.org>

~~~
5vforest
Awesome! Really neat, love the simplicity of it.

We're using this for our site, <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...)

------
malandrew
I know this comes from US Government data, but do you have any plans to add
neighborhood KML shapes for major cities?

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tmcw
KML, them HTML3 of geospatial formats.

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DiabloD3
Doesn't D3, the very awesome data graphing toolkit for JS, already use Census
data for its map stuff?

~~~
baconner
I 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.

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justinph
This looks very handy for adding details to the upcoming election results.
Thanks!

