MapIt Malaysia

MapIt for non-developers

MapIt is a system that sends data about administrations and other location-related data in response to requests from a website or service. This is useful if you are building services that require these data, for example, to identify which ward a postcode is in, what the nearest postcode is to a point on a map, or what the boundaries of an administrative area are – and many, many others.

In technical terms MapIt is classed as an API which stands for Application Programming Interface. It allows an external service to query data held in a database and return results. This removes the need to build such a database yourself – you can simply use MapIt in your application or site.

Example applications

MapIt can be used for all sorts of websites and applications. For example:

• FixMyStreet is mySociety’s street problem reporting service, which uses MapIt to find the right area on the map when the user enters their postcode, and to assign problem reports to the correct local authority when the user drops a pin on the map to show the problem’s location. It also relies on MapIt to plot local authority boundaries. In 2014, Sinar Project ran Aduanku as a local instance of FixMyStreet for Residents in several local town councils to report issues.
• WriteToThem is mySociety’s site to make it easy to write to politicians by just entering the UK Postcode, which uses MapIt to find the right area on the map when the user enters their postcode, and to find the correct MP's email address to send to.

Possible uses

MapIt can be used for the following:

• For a postcode: find the National Grid and latitude and longitude co-ordinates for a postcode, and which administrative areas it belongs to, such as ward, the local authority area, super output areas, the parliamentary constituency, and the European region.
• Partial postcode such as SW1A: find the national grid and latitude/longitude co-ordinates for the centre of that partial postcode.
• Point: find out which administrative areas a point (expressed as a latitude/longitude) is contained in.
• Nearest postcode: find the nearest postcode to a point on the map.
• By area: find data on an administrative area, such as its boundaries, or an example postcode in this area. You can also get “digital boundaries” to map the area, in e.g. WKT, GeoJSON or KML formats, for use with maps and/or geographic information systems.
• Related areas: look up which administrative areas are contained within an area (e.g. all wards of a council), which areas it borders with, covers and/or overlaps with.
• Multiple areas: get information about several areas at once, by type of area (e.g. city council) or area name.
• Generations: shows a list of updates to MapIt information, with a unique number for each update (or “generation”). This helps with instances where you want to query historical data, for example.

Rate limiting

The service has an automatic counter that tracks the number of requests sent to it by a user, and limits requests if they reach a certain volume. This is set at an average of 1 call per second in a rolling 3 minute period. The reason to do this is to make sure the service does not get overwhelmed by huge requests volumes which could risk it going down for all users.

Where the limit is exceeded, the service will stop sending data until the average goes back within the set limit.