From: Tom Lee <[email protected]>
I think that most folks on this list will be interested in the new features
that Google added to their Civic Information API yesterday:
http://googlepolitics.blogspot.com/2013/11/civic-information-api-now-connecting-us.html
In short: an address query will now get you information about who
represents you across a truly impressive number of levels of government.
Give it a try:
https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/us_v1/representatives/representativeInfoQuery
For us at Sunlight, the most exciting part is the identifier system that
underlies the system. Our Open States team led the effort to create a
reliable scheme that could be used to connect data about political
representation across jurisdictions and domains. I wrote a bit more about
it here:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/11/19/whats-under-the-hood-of-googles-new-civic-information-offering/
OCD-IDs are already being used by Sunlight, Google, OpenNorth,
OpenElections and Granicus, among others. If you manage a dataset that
concerns political geography, we hope you'll consider connecting it to this
ecosystem by adding support for OCD-IDs. The easier these crosswalks get,
the more powerful this data universe becomes. And adding support for these
identifiers is painless, I promise. You can find docs and details at
http://opencivicdata.org/
As always, we're here to help -- please do let me know if this induces any
head-scratching.
Tom
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