Display property shapes & other shapes on map

[VinylFox]

I would like to be able to display property shapes imposed on the map of the vacant properties. The data for the shapes exists already in OpenBaltimore.

https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Geographic/Parcels-Shape/jk3c-vrfy

If this feature was made pretty generic we could use it to display building footprints along with neighborhood shapes.

https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Geographic/Building-Footprint-Shape/deus-s85f https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Geographic/Neighborhoods-Shape/ysi8-7icr

[jacobandresen]

I could take a stab at this. Do you think it could work if we added a table to store "shapes" in relation to a property. We could do a generic solution with following fields:

• property_id,
• name
• geometry - geojson description from the shape file

For this to work we would need a way to import the shape file. If all goes well this functionality could be a separate project that would create a easy way to share geodata.

Is anyone working on this?

[VinylFox]

Nobody is working on it yet.

Like you mentioned, the big part of this is just importing the shape data into MySQL and relating it to a property.

If you take a look at the db.sql file in this project, I have a concept for how to store the shape data.

[jacobandresen]

cool. I'll poke around here for a bit.

[mroswell]

I've been using postgres with postgis extension for working with shapefiles in a database; If you stick with MySQL, this might prove helpful (just the result of a google search, but looks promising);

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960590

[jacobandresen]

We could also consider converting the shapefiles to geojson: https://github.com/calvinmetcalf/shapefile-js ,

[mroswell]

http://www.shpescape.com/ http://cartodb.com/ http://mapshaper.com/test/MapShaper.swf (to generalize)

[jacobandresen]

I installed quantum gis here. http://www.qgis.org/ . It succeeded in importing Parcel.zip and exporting it to geojson.

Looks like shpescape.com did not finish converting Parcel.zip.

I hope to find a solution that runs on mysql with minimal changes to the codebase on the serverside.

[jacobandresen]

I experimented a bit with mangomaps. The result is here: http://mangomap.com/maps/11042/Baltimore%20Parcels#

It looks like the result is accessible via WMS through basic authentication.

[jacobandresen]

looks like github made this easy: https://help.github.com/articles/mapping-geojson-files-on-github . So we could convert the datasource to geojson and display them via github.

[jacobandresen]

Your new work using mongodb and geojson seems the way to go.

[VinylFox]

My friend Chris put together a similar site about New York taxes, and I'm using a lot of the technologies that he used. Mongo is super fast with geo bounds searches too.

https://github.com/chriswhong/taxMap