Michael, What you need is a GIS with some GIS data (of which shapefiles is one of the common formats). http://www.osgeo.org/ lists some open source GIS packages. For the data you may to look at the Magic data service from the government. There maybe administrative boundaries available there, or take a look at what's available from the Census. There are some data sets like the Index of Multiple Deprivation which is ward based. That would be a start to identifying local authority boundaries. The GIS package will take the postcode (really latitude/longitude) of your organisations and compare it the polygons of the administrative boundaries and report back which points are in which polygons. It's a spatial sql query underneath.
I'll have a google and see what i come up with. Andy On Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:50 +0100, "Michael Lenahan" <[email protected]> wrote: Hello everyone I'm fairly new to the list, so please advise if my question is not appropriate. I have been gathering address and UK postcode data of all the organisations we work with (I'm at a government agency which does a lot of educational and arts-based project work). I would like to generate maps and reports for MPs, MSPs, AMs, MLAs and others about the activities we fund in their region. I'm aware of the wonderful [1]theyworkforyou.com apis, especially [2]http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/docs/getConstituency for Westminster constituencies. I would appreciate help on how to match against other boundaries such as Welsh, Scottish, NI devolved administrations and UK local authorities. I have seen in other posts that there are licencing restrictions for postcode data, of course I am happy to geo-code the data and then use latitude and longitude to get the match. I'm not very familiar with mapping concepts but understand that if I have geocoded data it will be possible, using a shapefile (?) to map the location to the various geographical areas. Are such shapefiles available for the various types of UK boundary? How does tfwy determine the match between a postcode and a constituency? Thanks for your help Michael References 1. http://theyworkforyou.com/ 2. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/docs/getConstituency
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