Monday, December 22. 2008

NY Times Geo App Offers Location-based Political News for New Yorkers

It's called Represent and it uses a New York address as the starting point for a search for news about your region and what its elected officials (local up to federal) are doing. The interactive feature hails from The New York Times’s Interactive News Technology group and went beta last week.

The search involves a "point in many polygons" search to determine into what districts the address falls, then assigns the representatives. The next step is to build a news stream on those individuals.

Among the technologies and data used: Django, GeoDjango, maps from New York City’s Department of City Planning showing district boundaries for City Council, State Assembly, State Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), PostgreSQL, PostGIS, GEOS, Geo-Coder-US.

Hat tip to Amy Gahran for the lead.

- New York Times

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