Common repository of municipal geodata

[waldoj]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[waldoj]

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]

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.