Planning Aid for Sydenham

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Tim Lund
Posts: 6718
Joined: 13 Mar 2008 18:10
Location: Silverdale

Planning Aid for Sydenham

Post by Tim Lund »

Having raised the matter of how the Sydenham Society directs its attention to various planning issues - described by Mary as 'having a pop' at them here, I thought I'd see what might be involved in what I speculated about in this earlier post
it is surely only a matter of time before web developers get round to writing code which will be able to 'scrape' such pages to automate such tasks, and so identify cases which groups such as SydSoc might be expected to get involved with, and those it does.
My web coding skills are a bit limited, but using VBA I have managed to produce a spreadsheet listing the cases in Sydenham Ward with the Sydenham Society in the list of consultees - downloadable here.

There are lots of ways it could be extended - picking out other consultees, other wards, looking for key words such as 'extension', restricting the dates looked at, using addresses and post codes and google geo-mapping to look for applications (roughly) within a given distance of somewhere. It would also be possible to pick out active cases by the number of documents uploaded on to the Lewisham planning site. If anyone - whether active in SydSoc or not - is interested in further development, let me know. Especially if you are good with PHP or some other scripting language.
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