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Open Roslindale building permits
By adamg on Wed, 12/28/2016 - 9:59am
This map, called up from the city's building-permit database, shows current Roslindale projects with a value of at least $1,500. If you see a bunch of yellow circles with numbers, ratched the map zoom up a level to show individual addresses. You move around the map by clicking and dragging. When you click on a marker, you'll find details for the project in the bottom box.
Neighborhoods:
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Comments
This is very helpful
Did you put it together Adam?
Thanks
The city has a bunch of databases accessible via its data portal, which lets you do various database-y filter-y things and for many of the databases, create maps. And if you have an account on the system (they're free), you can then save the view you've created and embed it on a Web page (they also then become a database view that other folks can play around with).
I did something similar a few
I did something similar a few years ago when I was house-hunting. I created a crime map using the blotter from the somerville online local and fed it through the old GMaps API. Have you done anything like that, and how would you compare the map you made to that?
Ayup
http://www.universalhub.com/crime (and the neighborhood pages linked off it) is built out of a customized Drupal template and a module that looks for the address in content stored with that template, gets the coordinates from Google, then uses a customized Drupal "view" (basically a SQL query built out of a point and click interface) to build just the map you want.
Because I've been using Drupal for quite awhile now, I personally prefer that interface, because I can get it to look just the way I want it and the data's stored on my site, so no worries about what happens should the other site go down.
But for an interface to constantly changing city data? So far, the city interface works very nicely. It has a learning curve, but it's way easier than having to learn an entire content-management system!
Useful but reminds of my biggest home purchase fail ...
Slick.
We've got an interior renovation permit at the moment that showed right up in your interface.
The boston website was a bit hard to navigate but after a learning curve it was pretty easy how to get off the landing page that offers up the raw database data and onto something searchable/viewable.
Although this reinforces my biggest real estate mistake EVER -- purchasing the house in my own name rather than using a trust as the owner. I've had to take a number of steps to make my physical address harder to find for people searching my name online and all of that shit got undone by the Boston Real Estate and Tax records that easily turn a name into a street address online, heh.
Share that with the city
Walsh's IT people seem pretty keen on activating stuff like this. I bet they would easily turn this into a standard feature at cityofboston.gov. Also, how about adding the rest of the city to the map?
Hmm ...
It used to be that when you saved a view like that, it would become public and get onto a list at the data portal. This view is public at https://data.cityofboston.gov/Permitting/Open-Roslindale-projects-greate... but looks like they're no longer adding user views to the list (or maybe I'm missing it somewhere).
Doing a citywide map would be possible, but also overwhelming. I wonder if a series of neighborhood maps would make more sense.