Boundary Service API

[James McKinney]

Christopher Groskopf, News Applications Developer at the Chicago
Tribune, released last week a service that aggregates GIS shapefiles
containing regional boundary data and republishes it through a RESTful
JSON API. In Canada, this would make extracting ward data much easier
for integration into apps like http://vote.ca/.

Blog post: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2011/01/28/steal-this-code-the-newsapps-boundary-service-api/
Source code: https://github.com/newsapps/boundaryservice/
Illinois implementation: http://boundaries.tribapps.com/

If someone wants to play with it with Canadian data, here are the
wards for Canada's open cities:

http://ottawa.ca/online_services/opendata/info/wards2010_en.html
http://www.citywindsor.ca/003733.asp
http://data.vancouver.ca/datacatalogue/votingBoundaries.htm
http://www.london.ca/OpenData/ShapeFiles_Zipped/Election_2010_ward-poll_boundaries.zip
http://www.toronto.ca/open/datasets/wards/
http://data.edmonton.ca/DataBrowser/coe/VotingSubdivisions#param=NOFILTER--DataView--Results
http://calgaryonlinestore.com/detail.asp?prod_id=2870

Nanaimo is open, but without ward data. Mississauga has data in KML
format only http://www5.mississauga.ca/research_catalogue/G_5_Municipal_Wards.kmz

James