= Overview =

Each !OpenBlock deployment requires data sets that are largely unique depending on the geographic region being served.

= Street Address Data =

To perform geocoding and provide a means of navigating at a block level, !OpenBlock requires a database of the streets in your area.  This must include each street's address ranges for individual street segments. If you live in the U.S.A. and your city hasn't had much new development since the year 2000, the U.S. Census' TIGER/Line file ( http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ ) may be sufficient.  Importers for ESRI Shapefiles with appropriate attributes also exist (!TeleAtlas street data?)

TODO: document how to load them

= Geographic Region Shapes =

You need to add some named regions of interest to your database and provide their geographic boundaries.  Usually, these regions are defined by providing a shapefile.
  

Typical examples:
* neighborhoods in your area 
* local zip codes

TODO: document how to load them, where shapes might be found

= News and Other Local Data =

You'll need to find some online data to feed to your system, and write (or modify) some "scraper" scripts to fetch that data and load it.

== Examples of Data == 

* local news / blog feeds
* public meeting minutes
* public events calendar
* crime reports
* building permits
* health inspections


== Recommendations for getting data ==

* Find out if there are license restrictions on using the data
* Find out if there are already feeds (RSS, Atom) you can use.  Feeds are easy to parse and there is existing infrastructure to handle them.
* Find out if the data has already has been geotagged with a latitude, longitude.  If so, ideally it would be in the feed in a standard format like GeoRSS.
* If there are no existing feeds, and it's government data, it's time to start making phone calls and persuading your local officials to release their publicly-owned information. http://resource.org/8_principles.html has some good recommendations - emphasize the "machine readable" part.
* If you can't get a feed, but the data's on the web in some form, there is scraper infrastructure to handle other formats (HTML, CSV, PDF, ...) but you'll have to do some scripting.  Scraping HTML or PDF should be seen as a last resort, since any future visual redesign is likely to break your scraper, but sometimes that's all you can get.

The best and most usable data is:

* available in a standard, machine readable, open format
* accessible publicly over the internet
* updated frequently
* explicitly tagged with geographic metadata
* free of restrictive license constraints


== Resources ==
Many communities already have local initiatives cataloging freely available data

* [http://wiki.civiccommons.com/OpenMuni List of local data initiatives] on the Civic Commons wiki