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Re: elections canada

Posted by Hugh McGuire on Feb 02, 2007; 10:58pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/elections-canada-tp814p840.html

> see: http://civicaccess.ca/wiki/ProjetsCiviques
>
> Shall i start up spot and some notes about visiblepolitics.org on the
> civicaccess wiki somewhere?
yeah! I have to go offline shortly and wont be back online till Monday.
h.



>
> cheers
> t
>
> Hugh McGuire wrote:
>> If I read this page correctly:
>> http://www.statcan.ca/bsolc/english/bsolc?catno=92F0193U
>>
>> it 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.htm
>>
>> This 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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>>>
>>
>>
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