Open Halton / Open Guelph Hackathon

(  Dec 4th 2010  |   9am-6pm  |  1950 Meadowvale Blvd, Mississauga, ON   |   Register on Eventbrite here  ) 

WARD DATA (XML)

Project Idea:

If you've ever tried to find out information about your elected concillor in your ward, you probably know the drill: scour you city's website to find a map of your city's Wards (of course, a PDF map seems to be a prerequisite), locate your address on the map, figure out what ward you're in, then go back to the city's website to search for councillor information for your ward. This doesn't seem very efficient, does it? 

Problem Statement:

Navigating ward / councilor info is difficult, using PDF maps is so "Web 1.0" and definitely not the most intuitive way to identify ward information, and could definitely be improved.

Today’s ward info is in mostly in PDF maps, as well as HTML for councilor info: 

          Guelph: http://www.guelph.ca/cityhall.cfm?subCatID=855&smocid=1441

Halton: http://www.halton.ca/cms/One.aspx?portalId=8310&pageId=11279

Milton, ON:  http://milton.ca/council/mayorandcouncil.htm 

Oakville, ON: http://www.oakville.ca/wardmap.htm

          London, ON:  http://london.ca/d.aspx?s=/City_Council/ccm_councillors_ward.htm

          Guelph Eramosa Township (GET), ON http://www.get.on.ca/council-members.aspx 

We want to make it easier to find information, such as what ward you’re in, who your councilors or candidates are, and many other related Ward information (e.g. voting locations)..... and we want to make this easy to do on a web site and your mobile phone.

Solution:

We will be working on the liberation of ward, and elected official's data and making it available as a WEB and MOBILE app for Halton (Milton & Oakville), Guelph and London regions.

We're planning to break up the tasks into 3:

1. Liberate the data - converting ward boundaries from PDFs and images to KML, scraping/loading council & ward information and making it available via XML, so that developers can use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to interact with it.
2. Web application – we’ll use the available data as well as liberated data to develop a web application that leverages existing code like EMITTER.ca, and combines OSS (PHP and jQuery) with other platforms like BING maps for the base map layer.
3. Mobile application – lastly, we’ll try to leverage the data existing code like VanGuide/ODAF to build a mobile application will be developed for mobile devices so that people who are on the go can easily search and lookup information for a specific ward of a municipality.

Key Pages

• Features
• ToDo List 
• Source Data
• Map Tools & Links
• Data Tools & Links (PDF, CSV, etc) 
• Dev Links & Examples