datamade/represent-boundaries

Name: represent-boundaries

Owner: datamade

Description: A web API to geographic boundaries loaded from shapefiles, packaged as a Django app

Created: 2015-09-21 20:02:30.0

Updated: 2015-09-21 20:02:31.0

Pushed: 2015-09-21 20:08:18.0

Homepage: http://represent.poplus.org/

Size: 548

Language: Python

GitHub Committers

User	Most Recent Commit	# Commits

Other Committers

User	Email	Most Recent Commit	# Commits

README

Represent Boundaries

Represent Boundaries is a web API to geographic areas, like electoral districts. It allows you to easily find the areas that cover your users' locations to display location-based information, like profiles of electoral candidates.

It's a Django app that's easy to integrate into an existing project or to deploy on its own. It uses a simple file format to control how data is loaded into the API, and it provides a command-line tool to easily manage data.

Notable uses include:

• Represent helps people find the elected officials and electoral districts for any Canadian address or postal code, at any level of government.
• OpenStates.org allows anyone to discover more about lawmaking in their state and uses Represent Boundaries to help them find their state legislators.
• GovTrack.us helps track the activities of the United States Congress and uses Represent Boundaries to help people find their members of Congress.
• ANCFinder.org helps Washington, DC residents discover and participate in their Advisory Neighborhood Commissions.

Public instances include:

• represent.opennorth.ca for Canada: source code and data files
• gis.govtrack.us for the US: source code

Represent Boundaries is one of many Poplus Components: independent pieces of software developed to solve a range of common problems encountered when building civic and democratic websites. Check out the other components.

Documentation

Represent Boundaries should work in a Django 1.4 project. However, Django 1.4 has poor encoding support for shapefiles.

• Installation
• Add data to the API
• Use the API
• Update data in the API
• Read the API reference

Testing

tedb travis_ci_test
 travis_ci_test -c 'CREATE EXTENSION postgis;'
go-admin.py syncdb --settings settings --noinput
on runtests.py

Acknowledgements

Represent Boundaries is based on the Chicago Tribune's django-boundaryservice.

Released under the MIT license