vgrichina / mtv-projects

Mountain View, CA – Map of active construction projects

Mountain View, CA – Map of active construction projects

This isn't official information, it is based on official development project list available here: http://mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeprojects/list.asp

Data is scraped from PDF files and may contain inaccuracies. Please consult linked PDF files for accurate official information.

Your contributions are welcome -- please fork and submit pull requests.

Hacking on

index.html contains map frontend code itself. Change it if you want to change the way information is displayed.

data/projects.json contains scraped data. It is generated by combination of download.py and preprocess.py

download.py downloads pdfs from Mountain View website into data/ folder. It also converts them to text and parses using parse.py module. Results are written to data/projects.json.

preprocess.py prepares data/projects.json for use on map. It tries to parse addresses from project titles and geocodes them using Google Maps API.

Running locally

Requirements

• Python 2.7.x
• requests
• geopy
• poppler, pdftotext utility specifically

Download data

python download.py

Preprocess data

Create secrets.sh file with following contents:

export GOOGLE_API_KEY=<your API KEY>

API key can be obtained here https://console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials

python preprocess.py

Run local web server

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

This will start webserver available on http://localhost:8000. It is important to open web page from server as JS cannot load data if you open it locally from file system.