mention that i've made some headway in just working with simply unifying
the census boundary data, GID data, and GNIS data which are available
from the Census and USGS. It took a bit of data massaging and me getting
more familiar with PostGIS and GeoServer, but have built a basic lookup
service. Unfortunately, something is preventing Geoserver from staying
up for more than a few hours, so I'm still diagnosing that, but for now
I'm happy to at least make the cleaned and merged data available and
will be preparing the documentation for the process of managing the data
and setting up geoserver for it. Census only provides boundaries per
state from what I've found, so you have to spend some time importing
each of those and then merging all of the tables. Right now, I've just
been working with municipal data. The improved data I have now is GID
and GNIS in an SQL database, all municipalities as a PostGIS SQL
database as well as a single shapefile for all municipalities:
http://dropbox.ashlock.us/opengov/democracymap/census/
Here are screenshots of what this provides:
http://img.skitch.com/20101020-nfccjmwff7x3mg11jrgb6bfrx2.png
http://img.skitch.com/20101020-xp14d1tj3s6b8it8pgaddibcum.png
http://img.skitch.com/20101020-jh954ub98uf38g1x7yxswciqpn.png