[GIS] find latitude and longitude data for the borders of U.S. Congressional districts

data

I'm interested in finding the most up-to-date latitude and longitude data for U.S. Congressional district borders. I'd prefer a human readable format (e.g. XML), but I'm writing my own code so I can work with just about anything if the format is well-defined. I only need the state, district, and the latitude and longitude points that define the borders for each district.

I need the borders for all U.S. Congressional districts. Is this a dataset that I can download from somewhere all in one place? Or do I need to track down the data for each state individually? (Or even worse, each district?)

Best Answer

You can download a full set of US Congressional districts from the National Atlas, which includes a link to recent congressional districts. Once you've downloaded and extracted the data, you can use ogr2ogr to translate the data into another format if Shapefiles don't work for you. For example:

wget "http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/nationalatlas/cgd112p020_nt00354.tar.gz"
tar zxvf cgd112p020_nt00354.tar.gz
ogr2ogr -f "GeoJSON" cgd112p020.json cgd112p020.shp

Which will give you a JSON file with human readable coordinates, along with a few other useful attributes.

Related Question