How do I redevelop this site to be more accessible...
I'm working part-time to redo this website which is used as California's SOLE redistricting/census database but it just looks all over the place. Does anyone know anything about geographic data that is usually fed into GIS tools ? Currently all the data on the site is completely static, and not cleaned. I proposed a long term solution to consolidate all this data (aka clean the CSVs and combine them into a standard schema) and build a basic API service so that users (i.e. gov't redistricting employees and researchers) don't have to search for and download every single file they need, but some others (my "seniors") don't seem to know what to do either -- they want to move forward with creating a single table of files to download and add a dropdown/searchbar functionality filterable by enum types of the data currently already on the site. Thoughts?
You definitely need to clean the data and letting people accessing it from an API sounds like the way forward to do it. There's a guy called Kin Lane https://twitter.com/kinlane who's an expert in API especially if its something for a good cause I m sure he's willing to give you a little tip on how he has done it in the past for the other gov entities
There are a million reasons why you should use an API instead of a .CSV downloadable file...if your seniors don't think it's worth doing - you ask to them WHY...since everyone in the world is workiung on building more APIs, not ..less..
exactly... i felt like they were getting annoyed at how baffled I was getting that they weren't considering just cleaning and collapsing the data into a single SoT... so I left it alone :") i'm not sure what to do
show them this: https://www.data.gov/developers/apis and https://project-open-data.cio.gov/
this is super helpful. thank you so much!!! i'm definitely showing this to them today :-)
yw! 💪
Are you trying to parse this data and display it real time or just want to parse and store it in a more manageable format?
When I am working with GIS data (usually with ArcGIS) I like to reference
sacridini/Awesome-Geospatial'slist on Github . Referencehttps://github.com/sacridini/Awesome-Geospatial