AlexH

With all of the Google Map trickery going on, I took some time out on the long weekend to see if I could combine Google Maps with Election data.

The first step was to get the GIS data for the ridings. I used wget to recursively download the data from this page, which are self-extracting zip files. Linux’s unzip utility easily took care of extracting the files. Apparently they are in a file format called ShapeView.

Then I had to figure out how to deal with the GIS data. There is an open source tool called ShapeTools that can extract data.

Now the problem is how to deal with the coordinate systems. I’m still working on this. Basically what I need to do is make a reprojection of the GIS maps from whatever coordinate system that they used, to decimal latitude/longitude coordinates. It’s in BC Albers format which is a BC specific format, so I’ll need to figure out how to use proj.4 to convert them.

I did get a working version of the BC Election GIS maps. Port 81 seems to be working now, so the public can see it.

My next step is to write a Python script to parse the data and generate an XML file that GMaps can understand.