DaDem

This database connects electoral regions to democratic representatives. Specifically, it answers the question, "who is the democratic representative for a particular electoral region now?".

If we build the database ourselves (rather than reusing an existing one) the difficult bit is keeping it up-to-date. For instance, with 659 MPs, there are by-elections every couple of months; with something like 21,000 local councillors (figure from Councillor.info), by-elections take place all the time. Ideally we would like to be able to hand off maintenance of parts of the database to people in local councils, if they're happy to do so.

Here's a very rough sketch of a schema

For each representative we store their contact information for FaxYourRepresentative and some unique ID information (shared with TheyWorkForYou and PublicWhip in the case of MPs).

Each "electoral area" (generic name) gets an ID, which should be equal to the OfficeOfNationalStatistics's identifying codes for everything other than CountyElectoralDivisions. In that case we'll need to make up our own codes, since even BoundaryLine doesn't seem to have unique codes for these (it codes them all as 999999).

If we are going to delegate maintenance of this database, then we'd probably want to do it on a per-elected-body basis.

Could the answer be some kind of standard xml format? Possibly provide a tool and get councils to create a file that can be read. That way either the councils can do it or some interested person can. Or a simple web page with approval by a second person?

e.g.

<council>
<name>Anytown City Council</name>
<cid>001</cid>
<rep>
<name>A Smith</name>
<ward>1</ward>
</rep>
<rep>
...
</rep>
</council>

Obviously more information than that could be included.

Alternatively grab the council web pages directly and parse them (but the formats are always different, which would probably make it as much work as typing the whole lot in by hand).

A good list of all councils: http://www.oultwood.com/localgov/uk/

And our own list: ListOfAllCouncils