Web-Based Maps Provide
Data for Investors, Home Buyers

Like many cities, Portland, Ore., lets you look at local maps on its Web site. But Portland's maps tell you a lot more than how to get around town.

The city makes available free Web-based maps showing things such as land zoning, the frequency of different types of crime, wildfire risks, airport-related noise levels and the location of sewers.

Much of the data can also be downloaded and viewed in free software such as Google Inc.'s Earth application. This allows you to zoom through a three-dimensional depiction of Portland, with relevant locations -- such as sites zoned for commercial use -- highlighted in color.

The PortlandMaps.com site is one of several initiatives across the country that use new mapping technology to open up troves of government data tied to specific locations.

The maps could potentially help people decide where to live, for example, as well as assess development projects requiring community approval. Businesses, meanwhile, could make better decisions about locating their outlets. And the mapping tools are so easy to use that a wide range of employees could work with them, instead of just tech specialists.

"When you start making data available from the government, businesses can capitalize," says Jack Dangermond, president and CEO of ESRI Inc., a maker of widely used software for geographic-based analysis.

View From the Street

Online mapping has surged in popularity in recent years, thanks to more-powerful and easy-to-use consumer services from the likes of Google, Microsoft Corp., IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com and Yahoo Inc. On independent Web sites, people have taken those interfaces and plotted all sorts of data on them, such as apartment-rental listings and crime reports. Real-estate site Zillow.com, for instance, provides housing-price estimates and other information plotted on maps.

But a lot of the best location-based data have been trapped inside specialized computer systems without easy business or consumer access.

Governments, for one, possess some of the richest collections of data encoded with longitude, latitude and other specific location references. Such data include, for example, the routes of water utility pipes under a town and maps of sea temperature.

But for years it's been difficult or impossible for others to access. Governments and other groups stored and analyzed the data using expensive geographic-information-system, or GIS, software, with consumer and business access often limited to paper map printouts.

In some cases, the data are "sort of available on the Net today, but only in this very, very crippled way," says John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps. You might be able to see a Web page showing certain data, for example, but you wouldn't be able to lay it onto a map or otherwise present it in an easier-to-understand format.

Now new versions of the GIS software can more easily put the data on the Web, where consumers and businesses can view it using applications such as Google Earth and ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer. Increased adoption of a format for geocoded data from Google known as Keyhole Markup Language, or KML, is making it easier for individuals to tap GIS data once it's online. A recently released updated version of ESRI's software for computer servers could also have a big impact in this area.

"It's going to unlock a lot of new and useful and interesting applications," says Mr. Hanke of Google Earth and Maps.

Experts say that simply viewing data on a computer map is just the first step. As technology improves, and more data become available, consumers and businesses increasingly will be able to overlay multiple layers of data on maps to study a host of factors at once. They will also be able to manipulate the data in more-complex ways.

For instance, businesses might search for areas zoned for retail use, surrounded by high household incomes and low crime rates, and outside of earthquake zones.

"There is enormous momentum and motivation to make the data available," says Charles Foundyller, chief executive of technology research firm Daratech Inc.

ESRI's Mr. Dangermond predicts increasingly sophisticated uses of geocoded data. An individual might, for example, be able to take data from a proposed municipal zoning change and combine it with geospatial information from another Web site tracking the environment to evaluate the environmental impact of the zoning project.

The City Solution

Portland began making maps available on the PortlandMaps site about seven years ago, but has progressively made more data available. The site checks dozens of city systems to keep the information up to date. It extracts crime statistics from a police mainframe every night, for example, and provides live data from the computer system that handles building permits.

"Most of the stuff [Portland offers] was impossible to get before in any kind of format," says Rick Schulte, the city's corporate technology manager.

The city has also begun letting users download the information for use in Google Earth. Users click on links on PortlandMaps to download the data, which then become layers of information that a user can turn on or off in Google Earth.

When a layer is enabled, users can zoom around a virtual version of Portland, constructed from aerial images and including 3D mock-ups of specific buildings, and see color coding overlaid on the city related to the specific data. The zoning-data layer, for example, shows land parcels zoned for commercial use in red and single-residency housing in yellow, among other classifications. Mr. Schulte describes Portland's effort as "city self-service."

"We're putting information on our Web site [that] someone would traditionally have to come down to city hall to request or do it on the phone and tie people up," Mr. Schulte says. "All of these questions traditionally had to be handled face-to-face or phone-to-phone. There's a tremendous cost benefit there from a staffing standpoint."

The state of Oregon is pursuing similar goals. Officials are trying to make data from agencies throughout the state available through normal Web-browser software, as well as through software such as Google Earth.

Meanwhile, the city and county of Denver operate a site (DenverGov.org/maps) that includes over 700 layers of GIS data compiled from government sources, such as public-transportation routes and business-enterprise-zone classifications. Denver also sells custom data sets to businesses.

Some local governments are using Web maps to give the public a better look at new development. San Francisco consultancy Edaw Inc. is working with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, or Sacog, to provide government planners and the public with information about growth management in and around Sacramento, Calif.

Sacog has created a blueprint program that calls for denser urban redevelopment. Using a Web-based system Edaw has created, the planners can mock up new developments and get feedback on whether existing parking and sewage systems, for example, are sufficient.

Planners can then create a file with 3D representations of the plan that can be put on the Web and accessed through Google Earth or ArcGIS Explorer.

Richard Schwien, Edaw's director of technology, says Sacog plans to show the 3D models to community members at public workshops that start next month. Some of the local planning agencies have also expressed interest in publishing the models on their Web sites.

Urban Planning

The models are a big improvement over the old methods, says Mr. Schwien. In the past, he says, governments would generally show businesses and consumers maps and two-dimensional drawings of the plans. Once the designs were finalized, planners might commission 3D digital mock-ups of the projects to show the public.

But by then, the attitude was, " 'We can't go back in and make changes because it cost us $50,000 to get these high-end visualizations done,' " says Mr. Schwien.

While large collections of data have become available already, experts say a lot of work remains to be done to fully tap the information held by governments. Oregon, for example, must reconcile data sets from across the state that have different levels of geographic accuracy. Some counties' land-ownership data, for example, doesn't include precisely coded boundaries.

Governments must also wrestle with how much information to release. There are privacy concerns related to the release of land-ownership information, for one thing. And then there's public safety to consider. Portland and Denver, for instance, already restrict some of the location-related data they distribute to protect infrastructure from terrorism.

So, for example, data about the location of Denver manholes is not available digitally, though printed maps of them are available. But many officials are eager to iron out the problems and get as much information as possible to the public.

"The key for us is just to get the data out there," says Cy Smith, Oregon's state GIS coordinator and president elect of the National States Geographic Information Council. "That's been the problem: We haven't been able to get to the data."

-- Mr. Delaney is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau.

Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.