Submitted by johnh on December 11, 2005 - 19:31.

Several days passed, so here's a progress report on my efforts to port Writetothem and make it work for Ireland.

You'll want to read this because I've got something wicked cool to show you at the end.

First off, here's what's not useful: the Local Government Computer Services Board. They just sell software, and have no data at all. Trust me on this - I've called and spoken to them at length.

A nice helpful gent from the Dept of the Environment, who I managed to get on the 'phone, called a few county councils for me, then called back and suggested strongly that

• We need to pursue the Index to the Electoral Register, which apparently contains a full list of townlands and streets, matched against local Electoral Areas. With that info we can make a web lookup and "build" council seats as well as constituencies by aggregating EAs.
• He also suggested that we ned to start hitting them after Feb 1, 'cos that's when they'll be done building the new register. He reckons they're way more likely to fob us off while they're insanely busy at the moment.

So that's why I've set the pledge to run until Feb 1st. [Sign the Pledge! Sign the Pledge! ]

Meanwhile I'm getting on with things:

One line of work involves simply pretending for now that the address lookup is already solved, and moving on to the handling of people sending messages. I'm porting the actual Mysociety.org code at the moment to deal with that.

As a backup, I've taken the US National Geospacial Intelligence Agency (formerly NIMA) GeoNET data for Ireland and converted it into a MySQL database. As a gazetteer of populated places, it's not bad - it has over 3200 localities listed. The plan would be to ID townlands which are actually named in constituency definitions in the law, and mark them accordingly...

...then we get to the really smart-arsed bit.

The data set contains Lat/Long pairs. I could take everything in a county (everything in Cork, for example, has the value "4" in the 'adm1' field) and plot them all on Google Maps. Things which are mentioned by name as being in Constituency A will be in green, Constituency B in Blue, and so on.

Things which are in the gazetteer but not mentioned by name will be in red. Their 'bubbles' will contain links saying "assign this to constituency A", for example.

When things are marked out visually like that, for around 80% of place names the constituency they belong in will become spectacularly obvious. All it needs is a few eyeballs and some clicking.

Obviously, this won't work for the 'edge cases' which are townlands and villages which sit adjacent to a constituency border.

Anyway.

I promised you something "wicked cool". So here it is. A custom Google Map containing every single waypoint I have for County Cork. All 1095 of them.

Now wasn't that worth it? :)

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