Treasure Map for the Future

Inspiration

As the Houston population has been growing in recent years, so has the need for real estate and consequently, there has been an ever-growing necessity for investors or potential homeowners to have a tool that brings together different factors like change in value over time, population density, building safety/Hazardous materials, nearby resources and other useful data. Apart from that, we aim to make a tool that is useful for businesses looking for places to invest in, governments to research areas to which resources should be dedicated to corporations looking for areas to conduct research, and many more real-life applications.

What it does

Our project is focusing on the city of Houston and finding ways to modernize and develop the infrastructure. Houston as a whole is a good community that supports and helps in times of need which we can see through many hardships such as hurricanes with the city helping out. So, we are trying to help the city back as well as the population by recognizing the buildings and which may need to be renewed or where to invest. This map that we have created shows the building when it was built, and what it is built out of. If you select a location on our map it will pull up various data that will show how the building was made.

How we built it

We gathered the necessary building, address information from the Harris County Appraisal District Archive. From there we changed the file format, cleaned the data to pick out the information we thought was the most interesting, and put it together in python. Once we had the sorted data, we used the Google Maps API to get the latitude and longitude data for the addresses so that we could connect it to a geo-mapping library called KeplerGL to visualize it.

Challenges we ran into

we ran into challenge plotting and reading the useable data we extract from our open-source Houston housing data, using KeglerGl, a web application for geospatial analytic visualizations.
Implementing certain APIs as there is a monetary barrier to the access we have.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With the time given, we were able to code a webpage to present our information and data archives. We focused on data archives that consisted of information on the buildings around Houston that need development. We were able to accomplish this using HTML and Google Maps API. Our group was able to connect the information on the webpage and give the data to individuals.

What we learned

We learned how to use Google Maps AI and how to illustrate this on our website to help build the foundation of our project. We build the website through HTML and used various libraries discussed in previous sections.

What's next for Treasure Map for the Future

We would include the air quality and pollution data within the city to help show each section of the city and the digital footprint left Our goal is to give people a way to visualize the development of Houston and its infrastructure by providing data from the Harris County archives.