Importing data

MapIt has two main sorts of data – boundary polygon data (to show the boundaries of councils or other types of administrative areas), and postal code point data (if your country has a system of mapping strings to points in some way, such as the UK postcode or the US zip code).

Once you have installed the software, you could use its built-in admin interface at /admin/ to add types, generations, areas, and postal codes, and they would work in the front end service. For details of the different things you can add via the admin interface, see how data is stored. You can draw and edit boundaries using the admin editing function. If you have no digital boundaries or information, and this is the only way to get data into your MapIt, then this would be the way to go.

However, if you have some bulk data you wish to import (such as KML files or Shapefiles of boundary data, or CSV files of postal codes), you will probably want to try and import this data into MapIt automatically.

If you have some KML or Shapefiles of some boundaries, you can load these into MapIt directly using our import script – see Importing boundaries for more details.

Importing CSV-based postal code data is also straightforward – see Importing postal codes for more details.

If you have other, more complicated, requirements, you might have to adapt or write your own importer in Python – you can see the current import scripts in the mapit/management/commands/ directory for how they work.

Note: If you get the error django.db.utils.DatabaseError: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x00 at some point, you are probably being bitten by this bug - the solution is to add standard_conforming_strings = off to your postgresql.conf file, or to apply the patch in that ticket.