Land Explorer

With a proof of concept under its belt, Shared Assets asked Spork to build a best-in-class mapping and discovery tool for communities needing information about land in the U.K.

There’s a lot of information about land, generally, but in a plethora of places and rarely brought together as project required. We set about looking at a LOT of data-sets.

Using Mapbox as a tile server, and the Ordnance Survey API to supply the map itself, we grabbed a variety of data, in a variety of formats from a variety of sources. The application displays soil type, historic flood data, land classification, green/brown field, areas of special scientific interest and protected areas of anywhere in the UK.

We created drawing tools to measure land and draw plans so that users could save and share with each other their ideas.

Some blood and sweat went in to this project, and every library we used required reverse engineering to get it running nicely.

Spork are really excited to see how this app is used by the community. In fact, one of our developers even used it to measure out land in Yorkshire to check that a marquee would fit for his sister’s wedding.

So we’re hoping it’ll be useful to a lot of people for a variety of reasons, and look forward to working on it more with Shared Assets.

Check it out