Tag Archives: toronto

toronto’s human centre

Since it was trivial to calculate the centre of the city, I thought I’d do something a little more complex: calculate the centre of the city, weighted for population. I scraped the 2006 population data by ward from the City … Continue reading

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Toronto’s Angles

As many Canadians will tell you, most Torontonians are a bit skewed. While others might have different explanations, I put it down to our road grid. What we call north in the city is actually some 16.7° west of north. … Continue reading

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Finding the exact geographic centre of Toronto

Spacing has alluded to it. The Ontario Science Centre makes bold (and incorrect) claims about it. But here’s the real deal. If you consider Toronto to be defined by its city wards, the centre of Toronto lies at 43.725518°N, 79.390531°W. … Continue reading

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oooOOOooh!

Now that’s a bit better. And I did it with only mild shapefile abuse. You can load the DBF component of a shapefile into Openoffice Calc. Columns get given headers which describe their format. By pasting in the candidates column, … Continue reading

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closer to ward maps: scraping the data

Toronto publishes its candidates here  http://app.toronto.ca/vote2010/findByOffice.do?officeType=2&officeName=Councillor in a kind of tabular format. All I want to do is count the number of candidates per ward, remembering that some wards have no candidates yet. Being lazy, I’d far rather have another … Continue reading

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Labelling: harder than it looks

I’m rather taken with Mez’s rather neat Toronto ward candidate maps. I wonder if I could reproduce them (semi-)automatically? As a start, here’s the Toronto Wards layer, rendered in QGIS with the ward number as a label: You’ll notice that … Continue reading

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tale of two cities: coordinate reference systems, and what on earth is the maywood tot lot?

For reasons that are not particularly clear, the Toronto.ca|Open data is in two different coordinate reference systems (CRS), MTM 3 Degree Zone 10, NAD27 (EPSG 2019) and UTM 6 Degree Zone 17N NAD27 (EPSG 26717). This confuses QGIS even if … Continue reading

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my first real spatial query: finding nearby libraries

Me and Catherine are quite partial to libraries. I’m going to use the address points database we made yesterday to find the libraries within 2km of a given address. It’s not a very useful query, but it shows the very … Continue reading

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a simple geocoder for toronto

I’m going to use SpatiaLite and the Toronto One Address Repository to try some simple geocoding. That is, given an address, spit out the real-world map coordinates. As it happens, the way the Toronto data is structured it doesn’t really … Continue reading

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free geodata for the numpty-about-Toronto

So if I want to learn some GIS skills, it would be helpful if I had some data to work with. Here are two data sources I have slight familiarity with: toronto.ca | Open Shapefiles, comprising: Municipal Address Points – … Continue reading

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