KML shapes of any US state, city, or county, made possible by the U.S. Census
github.com
github.com
My existing workflow for this kind of thing (but not down to city level) has been to start with Wikimedia Commons's SVG-ification of the county/state borders (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIP...), and then apply appropriate transformations to the SVG file, like shading the counties (tutorial on that at http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...). I might continue to use that for quick-and-dirty uses, but proper shapefile data is more flexible, and the city outlines are a very nice addition.
One of the cool things about this script is that it can be extended to grab any of the data from the Census -- for example, I'm using a less-polished version to grab state legislative districts (both lower and upper houses).
Weather companies like Accuweather were annoyed by the National Weather Service releasing weather data in KML form -- they saw it as a threat to their lucrative business of selling public domain weather data. Sen. Rick Sanatorum tried to come to the rescue with a bill that would limit their ability to release that data.
The job of the government, and in this case, the senate, is to represent the populous, in this case the state, not play special party to any particular organization.
Accuweather has fewer than 500 employees many of whom are not even in Pennsylvania, meanwhile Pennsylvania has a population of almost 13 million.
So why exactly is it that you think it is 'just', 'correct' or any other possible form of 'right' for this senator to support this company for any other reason than it being in the best interests of his _true_ constituents? That is, the people he represents that are not in the, at most, ~.0035% of his states population that work at accuweather?
It is good IMO for a rep to fight for legislation that helps local businesses when that action serves his constituents as a group over the long term.
That's not the case here because what Santorum did is attempt to artificially block competition in a space where competition is likely to benefit all of his constituents in the long term. It's selling out the majority for the sake of one small business and creating a wasteful bit of government that small gov types like Santorum ought to be fighting against. It's creating a barrier to free market completion for the sake of a small win for one small company.
Of course, all those arguments miss the point. The weather service is an important function of the government, we shouldn't have to pay for weather. It's a matter of public safety and information, the property of the commons, not some commodity. Protecting that is the reason we have a government, not to artificially support a Senator's local business.
To expand on you reasoning a bit I think there is a general test we can apply to all government data collection and publishing practices. If the data is being collected then its been determined to be in the public's interest to do so and therefore it's also in the public interest to release it freely in a reasonably accessible format. If the set is not useful then releasing it serves to at least inform citizens that we're wasting money so we can exert pressure to stop collecting the useless set.
The exception of course is gov data that may have privacy or security implications but nevertheless eventually it should be released when those concerns are no longer valid.
http://market.weogeo.com/?query=census&lat=37.20852&...
It is always good though to see governments try and make using their data easier. Quite a shift...
Any applications built to analyze elections data with map overlays require this data, and it's really hard to come up with some 250k voter districts from disparate sources.
And yeah, you're on point about redistricting being a complete f'ing headache. Do you know if there's any centralized government source for maps of redistricted precincts?
Secretaries of State seems to keep shapefiles of their districts, but its never all of them. Check those websites first.
Local boards of elections are required to keep some record of the precinct maps on hand, but in many places aren't required to keep past ones - so it is in fact impossible to keep historical GIS data for some counties. There's also a lot of cases where records are simply kept as pencil or pen sketches, and no shapefiles exist.
You want to build a majorly disruptive business? Provide brain-dead-simple GIS tools to boards of elections so they can re-draw their own district maps every year. Offer them to software for free, and then resell the data they create to people building campaign tools - or build your own campaign tools and sell those.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but I should make it clear that we're not a government-affiliated entity.
(I noticed google maps now knows zip code shapes)
We're using this for our site, http://www.mygovhub.org, which grabs down to the county & local level. (Although we don't have districts at that level, as they'll have to be inputted manually...)