[openspending-dev] Storing Geodata on Openspending - is this even a good idea?

Tue Sep 23 17:13:58 UTC 2014

I think once you move away from points (which can be used to represent cities), a user-contributed mapping system is going to be difficult to implement.  On our California site - http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/ca - we represent cities as points in a database, but county boundaries are hard coded.

If someone has an international open source library of political boundaries, it would be wonderful to use that.

Marc Joffe
Public Sector Credit Solutions

-----Original Message-----
From: openspending-dev [mailto:openspending-dev-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Michael Bauer
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2014 9:47 AM
To: openspending-dev at lists.okfn.org
Subject: [openspending-dev] Storing Geodata on Openspending - is this even a good idea?

Hi there,

I've realized there is no easy way to turn geographically based budget data (e.g. projects in different regions of a country) into a map (e.g.
choropleth). 

I've thought about creating a mapping visualization for openspendingjs.
There seem to be two ways to do this:

A) The user supplies a topojson/geojson file with the visualization and which parameters to join the data together.

B) We store geodata (shapes, points) on Openspending in a dataset.

ad A)

Seems to be quite easy to do - 

ad B) 

While it might be weird to add a geometry attribute to dimensions this could be a lot more flexible.

e.g. you have geo-references on three levels: Think about projects budgeted for in regions and provinces. All three, the project, the region and the province have a geographical component. Why not add geometries to all of them and have the map determine which level of detail to show based on zoom levels?

Any thoughts are appreciated!

Michael

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