And someone needs to retranslate the English entry for Russia.
Yes, definitely it needs a new translation... but the gist of it is interesting. Drilling into that entry's claim of an open registry available online with "simple web forms" you can find government sites like this one, that for free provide all parcels (!) in Russia, a region that is about three times the East-West extent of the lower 48 US. It automatically gets more or less detailed as you zoom in/out. For the link above, I just zoomed in at random to the outskirts of Suzdal, a small town full of ancient churches and monasteries that eight hundred years ago was the capital. If you click on one of the parcels you get a pop up with info (in Cyrillic, unfortunately... don't they know that the entire Web is supposed to be in English?...). It's a total hassle that in the US there is no nationwide, free, online site providing parcel maps. I can add a cadastral parcel layer to a Manifold project for France, New Zealand, Russia, or many other countries, but not in the US. Sigh! Does anybody know of a list of countries for which parcels are published openly online? By the way, it's interesting how comments like Tim's can lead to fixes and improvements in Manifold. Drilling into Tim's link and comment I noticed that you can create WMS data sources for sites like the one for the link I provided, but in that particular case when Manifold builds a hierarchy under the data source for the various data sets brought in, the folders are named with ???? characters, a classic indication something about fonts / languages is not all there. I couldn't get the vector layers to work, so the WMS layers aren't as sharp as what you see in the browser URL link I provided. I've filed a report to get the ??? issue cleared up, as well as a note on the vector layers. Getting JSON server layers to work I've found is tricky given how people tend to implement them in so many different ways, but we may as well get as many possible variations into the zoo of variations that Manifold can handle. For those who are curious, I've attached an .mxb project with a location, Suzdal, with a Map that shows approximately the same spot as the browser URL link above. In the project, if you open up the data source used, it shows the ??? problem. The map opens using a Bing satellite layer as the top background layer, so you can see how the parcels overlay satellite photography reasonably well (as, I guess, one should expect from a Torrens system agency archive...). If you turn off the Bing satellite layer, the next layer is a Yandex streets layer, showing the churches in the view. It's interesting that Suzdal is the kind of place where if you just zoom at random into town you're likely to hit a few churches... Thanks for the link! I sure wish the US had open, nationwide, online publication of parcel maps. [Edit] Can't resist noting... just realized that the .mxb I attached is only 2kb. It's wild you can publish such a tiny project with a location in it that has the potential to convey so much info in such a small file (using links, of course...), that anybody in the world can see, for free, using Viewer... :-) Attachments:
Suzdal.mxb
|