I had a positive reply from Chis Mead, the elections editor at the Press
Association with regard to the use of the PA data on my web site.  They were
OK about this use "as long as it remains an academic project with no
commercial element and the PA continues to be credited." This is generous of
them, especially in the light of the cost to Pippa Norris, and although it
doesn't translate into an entitlement for other non-academic sites, it does
show their willingness to share data.

The Election Commission site says the result will be there in time, but this
nicely illustrates a central trade-off  - TBL's "raw data now" chant should
mean that open data is available as early as possible, but that's when its
most costly to obtain, most valuable to commercial interests and of lowest
accuracy.

Chris

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Roger Moffatt <[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> What's the most reliable source of election result information that is in
> the public domain and/or open source? We were using the very handy
> ukparse.kforge.net data but have hit problems with the results in that
> some of the data is stale as result of the underlying sources not being
> updated (eg the guardian stuff which still shows the old majority and swing
> info (which is kind of expected I guess)).
>
> I note that some folks here have used the press association data, but from
> looking at their terms and conditions, any such use is strictly off limits
> without payment and written agreement - or are they happy to grant
> permission for free if you contact them? Likewise the guardian data is
> pretty restrictive if you use the api as you are not allowed to keep the
> data for more than 24 hours and I'd prefer to be able to update it on my
> terms, rather than someone else's.
>
> Maybe I'm missing something obvious? But I'm relatively new to the election
> data arena and so may not be seeing the wood for the trees.
>
> What we're doing with the data by the way is a small (currently free)
> iPhone app called MP Finder - which uses opendata from the Ordnance Survey
> for the polygon data for each constituency so that you can just tap anywhere
> on the map to find the MP rather than needing a postcode. We took all of
> that data and wrangled it into a kml file which then drives the webservice
> api we use for the lookup.
>
> But it would be great to get the results sorted as the app is a bit lacking
> in detail without it!
>
> Help appreciated
>
> Roger
>
>
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