Google recently released a beta of their map API and I thuought I would share something I threw together in about half a day. I see some terribly exciting things I can do with this once I figure out how to get the point count up and the load time down.

Warning: It takes about 20 seconds for the page to load.

http://www.carrollwoodtampa.com/mls/

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Tampa Real Estate

You should also check out Google's other application Google Earth

Google is basically bringing GIS applications to the common everyday user. With the Google Earth Pro you can incorporate your own GIS data (shapefiles, etc.) into an aerial application without having to deal with data projections, etc. I'm thinking about creating an application with parcel shapefiles, Future Land Use, Zoning, and last Sale Price amount.

A member posted data that incorporated the Florida Census Tracts obtained from a link on my Florida GIS Data Blogspot

The example can be viewed at Florida Census Tracts

Emgist

I was thinking more along the lines of using polylines to lay out school areas and possibly overlaying crime stats.

While the application you describe would be nice...it has already been done. I have seen exactly what you describe in a GIS app on the Pasco county website.

Check it out here:

http://maps.pascogov.com/maps/showma...quest=Mzk3Nzc=

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Tampa Real Estate

Hey gordhead, that looks great! Do you have that in a Mambo component or something? How could I set up something like that?

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Richmond Realtor

Richmond Real Estate Investor Association REIA

It is actually just a map div inside mambo. Pretty much all you need is access to the raw data in a database....if you have that pm me and I will share the code I put together.

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Tampa Real Estate

That's the main difference between the Google Earth application for the common user (viewing data) and GIS software such as ESRI ArcView (creating and manipulating data for analysis). Although I am sure Google will catch up soon enough.

The majority of counties (in Florida) have a school polygon layer or point shapefile. Some are as detailed as having the school name, school type (elementary, middle, high), phone number, principal, attendance zone, and website listed. Worst case scenerio if no layer has already been created, you can query the parcel shapefiles for every property owned by the County School Board to create you own layer.

As an example, once the school layer is loaded you can easily buffer all schools countywide (the school point / polygon shapefile) with 0.5 mile radius buffers, out to 5 miles (ie 0 - 0.5 miles, 0.5 miles - 1 miles, 1 mile - 1.5 miles, etc.) using any specified radius (feet, miles, etc.) Then if you have an crime database listing the address or lat/long of the incident you can geocode these points as well as color code them (robbery = red, battery = blue, etc.) Completing a selection by location and joining the two layers would give you an new output layer containing the attributes of both layers. This new layer would contain the crime incident type, number of incidents, and proximity to each school.

A PDF visual to my prior example:

A 1,000 ft (green), 2,000 ft (yellow) and 3,000 ft (red) buffer around every school in Hillsborough County that took me two minutes to create in ArcView.

Attached Images

SCHOOLS.pdf (39.0 KB, 112 views)