-
It’s a more common problem than you might think: given a list of postcodes, how can you match them to the administrative and electoral areas, such as wards or constituencies, that they sit within?
MapIt’s data mapping tool gives a quick, easy and cheap solution: just upload your spreadsheet of postcodes, tell it which type of area you want them matched to, and the data is returned to you — complete with a new column containing the information you need.
The tool can match your postcodes to every type of data that MapIt offers in its API, including council areas, Westminster constituencies, parish wards and even NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).
If that doesn’t sound like something you can imagine being useful, let’s look at a few hypothetical use cases (and if you have an actual case that you’d like to tell us about, please do let us know — we’re always keen to hear how our tools are being used).
Organisations, charities and campaigns sometimes need to match postcodes to administrative areas
Membership organisations, charities and campaigns usually collect the addresses of supporters, but don’t commonly ask them who their MP is (even if they did ask, most people in the UK don’t actually know the name of their MP).
But when a campaign asks followers to contact their MPs, it’s helpful to be able to suggest an angle based on whether the MP is known to be sympathetic to their cause, or not — indeed, there’s arguably no point in contacting MPs who are already known to be firmly on board.
So: input a spreadsheet of supporters’ postcodes, and get them matched to the associated Westminster constituencies.
For more advanced usages, organisations might match the MapIt tool’s output of postcodes with other datasets to discover the answers to questions like:
- Which members in a disability group have fewest GPs in their area, and might be finding it difficult to get help for their condition?
- Which supporters of a transport charity live in regions less served by public transport, and would be likely to take action to campaign for improved bus and train services?
- Which people affiliated to an ecological organisation live in predominantly rural areas and could help with a wildlife count?
Researchers sometimes need to match postcodes to administrative areas
Researchers often need to correlate people, institutions or locations with the boundaries they fall within.
They might have a list of postcodes for, say, underperforming schools, and want to find out whether they are clustered within authorities that have similar characteristics, like cuts to their funding or an administration that has a political majority one way or the other.
Teamed with other datasets, MapIt can help towards answering important questions like the number of people each CCG serves, how unemployment rates vary in different European regions, or average house prices within parliamentary constituencies.
Journalists sometimes need to match postcodes to administrative areas
Investigative or data journalists may obtain long spreadsheets full of postcodes in the course of their work, perhaps as a result of having submitted Freedom of Information requests to one or more authorities.
Perhaps they have the address of every university in the country, and there’s an election coming up — during the summer holidays. Knowing that students will mostly be in their home constituencies, they might be able to make informed predictions about how votes in the university towns will be affected.
Or let’s say that a journalist has gathered, from local councils, an address for every library scheduled to close. This could be compared with another dataset — perhaps literacy or crime rates — to draw conclusions over what impact the closures would have.
Part of a wider service
The one-off data mapping tool is just one service from mySociety’s MapIt, which is best known for its API.
This provides an ongoing service, typically for those running websites that ask users to input geographical points such as postcodes or lat/longs, and return tailored results depending on the boundaries those points fall within.
MapIt powers most mySociety sites, for example:
- When you drop a pin on the map while using FixMyStreet, MapIt provides the site with the administrative boundaries it falls within, so that the site can then match your report with the authority responsible for fixing it.
- When you type your postcode into WriteToThem, Mapit gives the site the information it needs to to display a list of every representative, from local councillor up to MEP, who represents your area.
- If you search for your postcode on TheyWorkForYou, MapIt tells the site what your Westminster constituency is and the site matches that to your MP. You can then be taken to their page with a record of how they have voted and everything they’ve said in Parliament.
Give it a try
Find out more about MapIt here or have a go at uploading a spreadsheet into the data mapping tool.
If you’re not sure whether it’s the right tool for your needs, feel free to drop us a line — and, as we said before, if you are already using it to good effect, please do let us know.
—
Image: Thor Alvis
-
What’s the best way to get your supporters to campaign, when the finer details of what they’re pressing for may vary from place to place? That’s the issue that faced Prostate Cancer UK as they call for better provision for men across the country with erectile dysfunction as a result of prostate cancer.
There are five core treatments for tackling erectile dysfunction, but whether all of them will be offered to you depends on your postcode. In some areas, all are offered as standard, while in others there may be none.
The tool we built for Prostate Cancer UK used several of mySociety’s areas of expertise, from mapping to user testing — we even used Freedom of Information. And putting it all together, we have a powerful campaigning platform that responds to users’ location, while raising awareness and pushing for improvement.
Prostate Cancer UK’s Erectile Dysfunction campaign site informs people about what care should be available to those who experience the condition as a result of prostate cancer treatment, and urges them to write to their local health commissioner if provision is poor in their area.
Educating, campaigning, sharing
The user is first informed: they are shown the five factors which constitute good treatment of erectile dysfunction. After that, they are prompted to input their postcode to see how many of those measures are provided by the NHS body responsible for their region.
If provision is poor, they are encouraged to help campaign: users can opt to write to their Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), Health Board or Health and Social Care Board to ask them to improve what’s available. They are given the choice between writing a letter from scratch, or using a pre-composed template which also contains a section for the writer to add a paragraph of their own words — a pragmatic balance that avoids an influx of identical form letters, while still addressing fact that when users are faced with a completely blank page, many will drop out of the process.
When you’ve done that, for those in England there’s also an opportunity to contact Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health to highlight the variation in treatment for erectile dysfunction and establish which organisation is responsible for the national commissioning guidelines.
Finally, the user is invited to share what they’ve learned, via Facebook, Twitter or email. Our user testing revealed that, contrary to our worries, people were happy to do this without embarrassment.
How it works
Like most of mySociety’s own sites, the ‘Better Care’ site uses MapIt to match the user’s postcode with a boundary, in this case the boundaries of the CCGs, Health Boards and Health & Social Care Boards. That’s how we deliver the information about what’s available in their local area.
When you input your postcode to see how your local provisioners are doing, MapIt also delivers information for other areas, including a couple of close neighbouring ones. This allows us to provide a nice comparison, along with the statistic that shows whether your provisioner is better, worse, or within the same range as the average.
But how did we gather the data to tell you how well each CCG, Health Board or Health and Social Care Board is catering for erectile dysfunction patients? Well, fortunately, thanks to our own WhatDoTheyKnow website, it was relatively easy to send a Freedom of Information request to every one in the country — 235 of them in total. The WhatDoTheyKnow volunteer admin team were able to help with this large batch request.
Once we had all the data and a general idea of how the tool would work, we took an early version out to test it with users. The insights we gained from this process were, as always, extremely useful, and led to us altering page layouts and other elements that made the whole process as clear as it could be.
Finally, we incorporated quite a bit of statistics-gathering into the whole tool, so that Prostate Cancer UK would be able to see where their campaign might benefit from further optimising in the future.
All in all, we’re very glad to have been part of this important campaign to help men understand what’s available to them, and where they might need to push for more.
Image: Brad Hagan (CC-by/2.0)
-
The Universal Credits system is replacing many other welfare benefits… but slowly. Its roll-out won’t be complete until 2022, meaning that many are, understandably, confused about just what applies within their own local area.
Now Lasa, in collaboration with the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group (LITRG), have launched a tool to help with that problem. Just input a postcode, and it displays information about which benefits apply — and, crucially, where to go for advice in your area.
Like Lasa’s previous tools (we wrote about their SocialCareInfo tool previously), UniversalCreditInfo uses MapIt to match postcodes to services.
It’s part of a suite of offerings, also available as widgets that can be placed onto any website. All fall within Lasa’s remit to support organisations in the delivery of social welfare law advice to the disadvantaged communities they serve.
We’re always glad to see MapIt used in other people’s projects, especially those that make a complex system easier to understand.
Apparently advice workers are already expressing their gratitude for the fact that they can have this information at their fingertips — so hats off to Lasa.
—
Image: Russell Davies (CC) -
Note (June 2016): This post is now slightly out of date. FixMyTransport is no longer running, though all of the other APIs and tools listed are still available.
There is also one significant addition which developers should find useful: EveryPolitician, which provides data on all current politicians around the world (and, in the future, we hope, all past ones too). See more here.
Much of what we do here at mySociety relies on Open Data, so naturally we support Open Data Day. In case you haven’t come across this event before, here’s the low-down:
Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.
If you’re planning on being a part of Open Data Day, you may find some of mySociety’s feeds, tools and APIs useful. This post attempts to put them all in one place. (more…)
-
All of us at mySociety love the fact that there are so many interesting new civic and democratic websites and apps springing up across the whole world. And we’re really keen to do what we can to help lower the barriers for people trying to build successful sites, to help citizens everywhere.
Today mySociety is unveiling MapIt Global, a new Component designed to eliminate one common, time-consuming task that civic software hackers everwhere have to struggle with: the task of identifying which political or administrative areas cover which parts of the planet.
As a general user this sort of thing might seem a bit obscure, but you’ve probably indirectly used such a service many times. So, for example, if you use our WriteToThem.com to write to a politician, you type in your postcode and the site will tell you who your politicians are. But this website can only do this because it knows that your postcode is located inside a particular council, or constituency or region.
Today, with the launch of MapIt Global , we are opening up a boundaries lookup service that works across the whole world. So now you can lookup a random point in Russia or Haiti or South Africa and find out about the administrative boundaries that surround it. And you can browse and inspect the shapes of administrative areas large and small, and perform sophisticated lookups like “Which areas does this one border with?”. And all this data is available both through an easy to use API, and a nice user interface.
We hope that MapIt Global will be used by coders and citizens worldwide to help them in ways we can’t even imagine yet. Our own immediate use case is to use it to make installations of the FixMyStreet Platform much easier.
Thanks OpenStreetMap!
We’re able to offer this service only because of the fantastic data made available by the amazing OpenStreetMap volunteer community, who are constantly labouring to make an ever-improving map of the whole world. You guys are amazing, and I hope that you find MapIt Global to be useful to your own projects.
The developers who made it possible were Mark Longair, Matthew Somerville and designer Jedidiah Broadbent. And, of course, we’re also only able to do this because the Omidyar Network is supporting our efforts to help people around the world.
From Britain to the World
For the last few years we’ve been running a British version of the MapIt service to allow people running other websites and apps to work out what council or constituency covers a particular point – it’s been very well used. We’ve given this a lick of paint and it is being relaunched today, too.
MapIt Global is also the first of The Components, a series of interoperable data stores that mySociety will be building with friends across the globe. Ultimately our goal is to radically reduce the effort required to launch democracy, transparency and government-facing sites and apps everywhere.
If you’d like to install and run the open source software that powers MapIt on your own servers, that’s cool too – you can find it on Github.
About the Data
The data that we are using is from the OpenStreetMap project, and has been collected by thousands of different people. It is licensed for free use under their open license. Coverage varies substantially, but for a great many countries the coverage is fantastic.
The brilliant thing about using OpenStreetMap data is that if you find that the boundary you need isn’t included, you can upload or draw it direct into Open Street Map, and it will subsequently be pulled into MapIt Global. We are planning to update our database about four times a year, but if you need boundaries adding faster, please talk to us.
If you’re interested in the technical aspects of how we built MapIt Global, see this blog post from Mark Longair.
Commercial Licenses and Local Copies
MapIt Global and UK are both based on open source software, which is available for free download. However, we charge a license fee for commercial usage of the API, and can also set up custom installs on virtual servers that you can own. Please drop us a line for any questions relating to commercial use.
Feedback
As with any new service, we’re sure there will be problems that need sorting out. Please drop us an email, or tweet us @mySociety.
-
We’ve added a variety of new features to our postcode and point administrative area database, MaPit, in the past month – new data (Super Output Areas and Crown dependency postcodes), new functionality (more geographic functions, council shortcuts, and JSONP callback), and most interestingly for most people, a way of browsing all the data on the site.
- Firstly, we have some new geographic functions to join touches – overlaps, covered, covers, and coverlaps. These do as you would expect, enabling you to see the areas that overlap, cover, or are covered by a particular area, optionally restricted to particular types of area. ‘coverlaps’ returns the areas either overlapped or covered by a chosen area – this might be useful for questions such as “Tell me all the Parliamentary constituencies fully or partly within the boundary of Manchester City Council” (three of those are entirely covered by the council, and two overlap another council, Salford or Trafford).
- As you can see from that link, nearly everything on MaPit now has an HTML representation – just stick “.html” on the end of a JSON URI to see it. This makes it very easy to explore the data contained within MaPit, linking areas together and letting you view any area on Google Maps (e.g. Rutland Council on a map). It also means every postcode has a page.
- From a discussion on our mailing list started by Paul Waring, we discovered that the NSPD – already used by us for Northern Ireland postcodes – also contains Crown dependency postcodes (the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) – no location information is included, but it does mean that given something that looks like a Crown dependency postcode, we can now at least tell you if it’s a valid postcode or not for those areas.
- Next, we now have all Lower and Middle Super Output Areas in the system; thanks go to our volunteer Anna for getting the CD and writing the import script. These are provided by ONS for small area statistics after the 2001 census, and it’s great that you can now trivially look up the SOA for a postcode, or see what SOAs are within a particular ward. Two areas are in MaPit for each LSOA and MSOA – one has a less accurate boundary than the other for quicker plotting, and we thought we might as well just load it all in. The licences on the CD (Conditions of supply of SOA boundaries and Ordnance Survey Output Area Licence) talk about a click-use licence, and a not very sraightforward OS licence covering only those SOAs that might share part of a boundary with Boundary-Line (whichever ones those are), but ONS now use the Open Government Licence, Boundary-Line is included in OS OpenData, various councils have published their SOAs as open data (e.g. Warwickshire), and these areas should be publicly available under the same licences.
- As the UK has a variety of different types of council, depending on where exactly you are, the postcode lookup now includes a shortcuts dictionary in its result, with two keys, “council” and “ward”. In one-tier areas, the values will simply by the IDs of that postcode’s council and ward (whether it’s a Metropolitan district, Unitary authority, London borough, or whatever); in two-tier areas, the values will again be dictionaries with keys “district” and “council”, pointing at the respective IDs. This should hopefully make lookups of councils easier.
- Lastly, to enable use directly on other sites with JavaScript, MaPit now sends out an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *” header, and allows you to specify a JSON callback with a callback parameter (e.g. put “?callback=foo” at the end of your query to have the JSON results wrapped in a call to the foo() function). JSONP calls will always return a 200 response, to enable the JavaScript to access the contents – look for the “error” key to see if something went wrong.
Phew! I hope you find this a useful resource for getting at administrative geographic data; please do let us know of any uses you make of the site.
-
I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode. It has a number of features not available elsewhere as far as I know, including:
- Full Northern Ireland coverage – we found a free and open dataset from the Office of National Statistics, called NSPD Open, available for a £200 data supply charge. We’ve paid that and uploaded it to our data mirror under the terms of the licence, so you don’t have to pay – if you feel like contributing to the charity that runs mySociety to cover our costs in this, please donate! 🙂
- Actual boundaries – for any specific area, you can get the co-ordinates of the boundary in either KML, JSON, or WKT – be warned, some can be rather big!
- Point lookup – given a point, in any geometry PostGIS knows about, it can tell you about all the areas containing that point, from parish and ward up to European electoral region.
- History – large scale boundary changes will be stored as new areas; as of now, this means the site contains the Westminster constituency boundaries from both before and after the 2010 general election, queryable just like current areas.
If you wish to use our service commercially or are considering high-volume usage, please get in touch to discuss options; the data and source code are available under their respective licences from the site. I hope this service may prove useful – we will slowly be migrating our own sites to use this service (FixMyStreet has already been done and already seems a bit nippier), so it should hopefully be quite reliable.
Thanks must go to the bodies releasing this open data that we can build upon and provide these useful services, and everyone involved in working towards the release of the data. Thanks also to everyone behind GeoDjango and PostGIS, making working with polygons and shapefiles a much nicer experience than it was back in 2004.
-
We updated our boundary and postcode database at the start of the week (apart from two wards in Scotland that I misspelled and updated on Tuesday, sorry), so hopefully everyone in the country can contact their representatives at WriteToThem or have their postcode recognised on HearFromYourMP or TheyWorkForYou. This applies especially to a small number of councils, such as Bradford, for which the boundaries had completely changed at their last election and which we were unable to get working until now – apologies for the inconvenience.
Related to this, and for interest, on 1st April, a number of councils are being abolished as their county councils become unitary authorities. The district councils within Durham, Northumberland, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire/Chester all disappear – Cheshire becomes two unitary authorities called Cheshire West and Chester, and Cheshire East. Lastly, Bedford borough council becomes a unitary authority, and Central Bedfordshire council covers the area previously covered by Mid Bedfordshire and South Bedfordshire.
Parliamentary boundaries in England and Northern Ireland are changing, but these do not take effect until the next general election – until then, your constituency and MP remains the same.
-
FixMyStreet has a lot of RSS feeds. There’s one for every one-tier council (170), one for every ward of every one-tier council (another 5,044), two for every two-tier (county and district) council (544), and two for every ward of every two-tier council (20,296) – two per two-tier council because you might want either problems reported to one council of a two-tier set-up in particular, or all reports within the council’s boundary.
Then there’s an RSS feed every 162m across Great Britain in a big grid, returning all reports within a radius of that point, the radius by default being automatically determined by that point’s population density, but customisable to any distance if preferred. That’s, at a very rough approximation assuming Great Britain is a rectangle around its extremities, which it’s not, 19 million RSS feeds, lots of which will admittedly be very similar. 🙂
Every single one of those feeds can be subscribed to by email instead if that’s preferable to you, and are all accessible through a simple interface at http://www.fixmystreet.com/alert.
However, none of these RSS feeds was suitable for the person who emailed from a Neighbourhood Watch site and said that all they had was a postcode and they wanted to display a feed of reports from FixMyStreet. Given you could obviously look up a FixMyStreet map by postcode, it did seem odd that I hadn’t used the same code for the RSS feeds. Shortly thereafter, this anomaly was fixed, and if you now go to a URL of the form http://www.fixmystreet.com/rss/pc/postcode you will be redirected to the appropriate local reports feed for that postcode (I could say that adds another 1.7 million RSS feeds to our lot, but given they’re only redirects, that’s not strictly true). And after a couple more emails, I also added pubDate fields to the feeds which should make displaying in date order easier.
It’s great to see our RSS feeds being used by other sites – other examples I’ve recently come across include Brent Council integrating FixMyStreet into their mapping portal (select Streets, then FixMyStreet), or the Albert Square and St Stephen’s Association listing the most recent Stockwell problems in their blog sidebar. If you’ve seen any notable examples, do leave them in the comments.
-
If you enter your postcode on TheyWorkForYou and it’s Scottish or Northern Irish, you’re now presented with your MSPs and MLAs as well as your MP, which makes sense given the site covers their Parliament and Assembly respectively. 🙂 You also get an extra tab in the navigation linking through to Your MSPs or MLAs. In order to do this, I needed a quick way of determining if a postcode was Northern Irish or Scottish. Northern Ireland was easy, as all postcodes there begin with BT. I assumed Scotland was also easy, which turned out to be true apart from the TD postcode area that straddled the border like a mail-sorting Niagara Falls. After some very dull investigation, I eventually worked out that e.g. most of TD15 is in England, but (amongst others) TD15 1X* is in Scotland, except for TD15 1XX which is apparently back in England. The final result was the postcode_is_scottish() function in postcode.inc, which (hopefully) correctly determines if a given postcode is Scottish or not – perhaps someone else will find it useful.