In preparing for the 2011 Provincial election I realized it would be convenient to work with the riding and poll boundaries from Elections Ontario as I have already done with the GIS data from Elections Canada.  Each organization has published "shapefiles" but for online applications KML is the standard data format. So the first step then is to convert the ESRI shapefiles converted to Google's KML format.

I'm a supporter of the open source movement so I'm making the KML/KMZ files available to everyone.  If you're interested in the details see below for the conversion steps.  But if you want to skip right to creating online applications feel free to start from the KML below.

Leave a comment if you get an application online - I'm always curious to see where ideas and collaboration lead to.

• All riding boundaries in a single KMZ.
• All poll boundaries in a single KMZ (big file!).
• Individual riding boundaries.
• All poll boundaries in a single riding.

ESRI Shapefiles to KML Cheat Sheet

• Download the ESRI Shape files from Elections Ontario.
• Ubuntu 10.04 is my baseline.  My first attempt was on Ubuntu 8.? but libgdal is too old (1.5.X).  The latest Ubuntu has gdal 1.6.X and that makes a difference.
• apt-get install gdal-bin libproj-dev
• ogr2ogr -f KML -t_srs 'EPSG:4326' all_ed.kml EO_107ED.shp
• ogr2ogr -f KML -t_srs 'EPSG:4326' all_pd.kml PD_107.shp

You can also generate per-riding KML files using a select clause (substitute XXX for an electoral district)

• ogr2ogr -f KML -where "ED_ID = XXX" -t_srs 'EPSG:4326' ed_XXX.kml EO_107ED.shp
• ogr2ogr -f KML -where "ED_ID = XXX" -t_srs 'EPSG:4326' pd_XXX.kml PD_107.shp

Paul Rademacher created a quick website to help us visualize the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  Here is the oil spill transposed on some real estate we're more familiar with - but even then it's still hard to imagine the size of the disaster.

On April 20th, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon left 17 workers injured and 11 missing and presumed dead. Oil is spilling from a well 5000 feet below sea level, discharging 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day according to the official estimate (though over 2 million a day, by private estimates).

The spill covers at least 2500 square miles of ocean surface. You can see the extent of the damage here as of May 6th, just southeast of New Orleans.

But how big is the spill, really? It's hard to get a sense of the true size when it's over the ocean floor.

Here are visualizations for Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, PEI, Regina and Vancouver. You can use Paul's website to generate images for your own area.

Ottawa:

Here is a copy of a letter I just wrote to my own councillor and the members of the Planning and Environmental Committee.  Over 30 people have already commented on the Sun article - hopefully that means quite a few people have written directly to the City as well in order to make sure they don't penalize people who make an effort to conserve.