Re: Geographical Map

A few further things to think about:

How are you defining localities? What happens if, like where I live, there are two 'Marysville's in Ohio, each in a different county?
What's wrong with pointing people at MapQuest or YahooMaps?
What's wrong with going to your state government site and using what they've got? This sounds like something voting software would have a solution for ...

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Comment on Re: Geographical Map

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Re^2: Geographical Map by xorl (Deacon) on Nov 10, 2004 at 20:14 UTC
Responces to the bullet points in order: Right now we're defining localities as counties and cities. Two Marysville hopefully would have different zip codes or some other way to tell them apart. We're not really looking for street maps. We want to display membership changes of our local groups. On the local level we want to be able to display membership by zip. I hope this application will have other uses beyond this. I haven't come across voting software that seems useful yet. We wouldn't mind using the voting precint as the basic unit. Even if there was something, I'd rather 'roll my own' since this seems like an interesting project to me.	[reply]
Re^3: Geographical Map by delegatrix (Scribe) on Nov 10, 2004 at 22:07 UTC
A word of caution - ZIP codes are not meant for mapping - they are meant for delivering mail. You're better off geocoding with FIPS codes. You can check out Census Bureau mapping resources at http://www.census.gov/geo/www	[reply]
Re^4: Geographical Map by Anonymous Monk on Nov 11, 2004 at 14:38 UTC
Take a look at geocoder.us for some great geocoding in action.	[reply]
Re^4: Geographical Map by Anonymous Monk on Nov 11, 2004 at 15:22 UTC
For geocoding / user mapping, it's worth looking at: Geo::TigerLine Geo::Coder::US ( and http://geocoder.us ) http://civicspacelabs.org/zipcodedb/ for shape drawing and projection, check out: Geo::GDAL Geo::Shapelib (which has a much nicer API than Geo::Shapefile) UMN MapServer rocks, and talks to free GIS backends like PostGIS. GRASS walks all over ESRI; http://freegis.org/ hopefully suggests that you have no need to buy ESRI products. xoxo	[reply]
Re^4: Geographical Map by belg4mit (Prior) on Nov 25, 2004 at 07:07 UTC
Here here! I've mentioned many a time in the CB that zip codes are (not necessarily contiguous) polylines in 3 space, not polygons. ZCTAs are also usable for this kid of thing -- Zip Code Tabulation Areas are the Census Bureau's solution to the hairy nature of zip codes. Other census ploygons such as block groups are good too. `-- I'm not belgian but I play one on TV.`	[reply]