[NI]: Consider loading geolocation from separate website

[k-nut]

The state of Niedersachsen has a dedicated website for showing school locations. The html file actually contains all locations of all schools along with (unfortunately nothing more than) their names.

It can be found at https://www.nls.niedersachsen.de/Schulkarten/Schulen_in_Niedersachsen_2024.html

I think we could try to run our existing scrapers for Niedersachsen and to also load the schools with their locations from the new endpoint. We could then string-match the names to their locations. A bit hacky but the closest to official geo data that I was able to find for the state.

[tifa365]

https://www.statistik.niedersachsen.de/startseite/themen/bildung/bildung-in-niedersachsen-interaktive-schulkarten-190675.html

Zu den interaktiven Schulkarten

Shapefiles

• Allgemein bildende Schulen
• Förderschulen
• Berufsbildende Schulen
• Schulen des Gesundheitswesens

[tifa365]

The underlying problem is still: The map does not expose a stable ID or even address to match on (https://www.nls.niedersachsen.de/Schulkarten/Schulen_in_Niedersachsen_2024.html). On the other hand, https://schulen.nibis.de/ provides the schools' number and other valuable data but no geocoded addresses. Since the later exposes more data and a higher number (+200) of schools, i would not switch to the shapefile alone.

My current approach is to reverse-geocode the nls geodata to a stable zip and kreis. We can then use school name, zip and kreis to match it against the advanced search of https://schulen.nibis.de/school/search and receive the actual nibis school result. It's a bit brute-force but I currently see no other option.

[tifa365]

I have now opted for the vibe-coded approach: geocoding the more complete NiBiS data using Photon, then matching Lat/Lon with the official NLS shapefile (which contains the geocoordinates), and feeding the NLS geocoordinates back to the NiBiS data that match the official NLS data. Unfortunately, this is significantly more time-consuming than the process for the other federal states. I’ll send another email to NiDiS to ask if the existing map function on the NiDiS website can be fixed.

#226