Posted by
Hugh McGuire on
Feb 02, 2007; 8:51pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/elections-canada-tp814p830.html
If I read this page correctly:
http://www.statcan.ca/bsolc/english/bsolc?catno=92F0193Uit costs $500 to get a list of postal codes sorted by electoral
ridings (not sure how you can then use that data? ... but surely such
"data" isn't copyrighted? it's just the formatted data right? I mean
you can't copyright "the list of Canadian postal codes sorted by
federal ridings," can you?)
also of note, I am sure many of you know about it, the "data
liberation initiative" of statscan:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/Dli/dli.htmThis is my favourite part from their documentation:
"When the cost of Statistics Canada data increased in the 1980's,
researchers, students and instructors at Canadian post secondary
institutions made increased use of American, British and even Chinese
data. This cheaper foreign data did not always reflect the Canadian
situation, and there were often gaps in the data."
and I sent them this email:
"Hello,
Do you have any plans in the works to liberate all that data to the
rest of us? Why only post-secondary institutions? What about citizens
of Canada?
Thanks,
etc."
On Feb 2, 2007, at 3:30 PM, Cory Horner wrote:
> Daniel Haran wrote:
>> Well, I first checked the copyright, which seems OK for non-profit
>> use.
>> Second, I tried to replace the postal code parameter in the URL, but
>> no dice. Non-geek translation: they make it difficult to check
>> different postal codes. Since no list that I know is public domain,
>> you'd have to more or less try each one to find the 500,000+ that are
>> valid. Could take a while.
>>
>> d.
>>
> Hey folks,
>
> I'd like to move howdtheyvote/quivotequoi in this direction too.
> Since
> we're already becoming a storing house for political information, why
> stop at votes?
>
> In the past i've aggregated US zip codes from a web form -- doing the
> same for Canada wouldn't be difficult. One of the things high on my
> queue is hooking up geocoder to the geogratis electoral districts
> shapefile; this means we can return the electoral district / mp, etc
> when given a postal code or lat/long coordiates (and gives us the
> opportunity to find a location by clicking on a map).
>
> The main question is what can we redistribute? I think we are safe
> just
> providing these things as a service (with a big disclaimer at the
> bottom
> outlining the limitations of reuse, pointing at the backwards policies
> of the source data). Allowing people to download the whole thing is
> probably okay, but we might have to attach a big ugly license to it.
>
> If people are willing to help scrape the information, i'm willing to
> host/present it.
>
> Cheers,
> Cory.
>
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