To be honest, I hadn't thought of actually *asking* the Beeb! Although looking at the HTML, it's so beautifully marked-up, it's almost as if they *wanted* someone to come along with a XPath parser and grab it mechanically.
So on the basis of "seek not permission, seek forgiveness", I'm scraping their site. They'll only say "stop it" if they notice after all, and if *this* isn't public data, I don't know what should be... On 25 Mar 2010, at 15:14, Matthew Somerville wrote: > Tim Duckett wrote: >> I'm looking for an XML-based API that would provide access to >> historical data for electoral results. Basically, what I'm after is >> the source data that makes up the 'Election Record' section of MP's >> pages on the BBC Democracy Live site, e.g: > > Have you asked the BBC if they'd make such data available, given they should > be doing things like that via http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ > You never know, might work! > >> Although the Beeb's done a nice job of marking up the HTML so it >> could be scraped, it would be *much* nicer if there was an API >> somewhere that could provide this. > > Wikipedia appears to be equally well marked-up, and goes back further, e.g. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basildon_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29 > >> Does anybody know of such a source? > > There's some spreadsheets dotted around: > http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/outlaw/sheetindex.htm > > http://www.politicsresources.net/election.htm#british > http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/edates.htm > http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/ge05/ge05index.htm > > ATB, > Matthew > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Tim Duckett ----------------------------------------------------- M - 07525 786 492 Skype - timduckett Blog - http://www.adoptioncurve.net Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/timd ----------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
