This is neat! After the huge price increase a couple years ago with GMaps, it looks like you’ve come up with a creative way to offer much of the same functionality for most users. It’s unfortunate to still see small business sites to this day with error messages on their map widgets because of the API change from Google.
I know nothing about mapping, but I’ve always had a dream of making a private neighborhood map which labels each house with people, sort of like a visual Rolodex. It would be great to have property boundaries, too. Do you have any suggestions for places to start? I don’t even know what file formats would hold this sort of data.
If you live in the US, you can get parcel information from your local tax assessor's website, usually. Sometimes it's devoid of owner information. Such cases usually require going to a company like ReGrid or Corelogic to purchase the data.
I work for a company (onXmaps) which produces user-friendly maps of such information. You could use our app to create such a "rolodex" of your neighborhood, by annotating individual parcels with your neighbors' information.
Thanks, Tony! I’m actually an Elite member of the off-road flavor! Is your recommendation to essentially use waypoints for the info?
In my mind I’d really like to host my own map which neighbors could share, just starting from a baseline of parcel boundaries and a way to drop info on each plot (onX does this wonderfully already).
Back in the day, my mom would make a little neighborhood diagram using MS Publisher and drawing boxes at the approximate locations of houses, and include names & phone numbers of each house. She would then distribute copies to the neighbors to hang on fridges. I loved that idea and basically want an online version of that, in a perfect world!
nice! yes, that's what I was suggesting for sure. You could put waypoints with contact info in a folder, and share that? Wouldn't obviously be useful for people without the apps.
Thanks! I don't know where you'd be able to get property boundaries, I guess it's usually not open-source / public data? Probably depends on the country / city.
In the USA, parcel outlines are commonly handled at the county level. You can often do a search for “[your county] GIS maps” and find their ArcGIS map of the county property lines with metadata about who owns what. Who knows if any of them are willing to share the data, but that’s where it lives.
also, for google maps I know you can respond to interactions with the supplied points of interest like buildings, including homes, and from that point you can obtain an address via reverse geocoding or some other technique. I expect other mapping tools may have similar abilities but I don't have any experience with anything other than Google.
I know nothing about mapping, but I’ve always had a dream of making a private neighborhood map which labels each house with people, sort of like a visual Rolodex. It would be great to have property boundaries, too. Do you have any suggestions for places to start? I don’t even know what file formats would hold this sort of data.