What is this?
The City of Bangor is awesome. They'e provided these datasets so that you and I can build useful tools and applications with a minimum of friction. That said, there are a few things you should know.
The City of Bangor’s basic planimetric and topographic data was provided from photogrammetric mapping by James Sewall Company in spring of 2010. Additional layers were developed by City staff by digitizing existing maps, plans & aerial photography, and by locating features in the field. Not all data layers are actively updated.
This data is intended to be used for general information and planning purposes only. This data is not a survey and should not be used as such. The City assumes no liability for any errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in the information provided regardless of how caused. The City further assumes no liability for any decision made or action taken or not taken by the user in reliance upon any information or data furnished hereunder.
The Maine Hacker Club is responsible for curating this data. If there are any errors, please let us know, and we'll do the best we can to address them!
Why is it useful?
All of this data is public. But to say that is always accessible has not always been the case. Hosting the data on GitHub seems like a great solution, and minimizes some of the friction that existed before. If you use this data to build something, we'd love to know! Send an email to Jacques, and we'll link to your project!
How do you use it?
All of the data here has been converted to the EPSG: 4326 projection, which is a fairly standard format for most web-related mapping. Conversion was done using ogr2ogr with the following command.
ogr2ogr -s_srs EPSG: 26847 -t_srs EPSG: 4326
There's really no end to the number of ways to use the data, but here are a few.
HTML Embeds
Since the data is hosted on GitHub, all files smaller than 10MB (most of them) can be rendered via a script tag. Here'show you do that.
Here's what the Airport layer looks like embedded:
Stream the data into your web app
Leaflet is always a good option, and has a nice tutorial on using GeoJSON.
Stream the data into your desktop client
This will vary a big depending on the application you're using, but most support the GeoJSON format.
In QGIS, it's as simple as adding a new Vector layer!
ArcGIS requires that you install the ArcGIS-OGR plugin.
And TileMill supports file streaming from remote resources as well.
Of course, streaming requires that you have an internet connection, so initial loadup might take longer than it would otherwise.
Thanks to @billdollins for this guide.
Questions?
The folks at the Maine Hacker Club are doing a bit of work keeping the data updated and converting it to a more web-friendly format. They're very friendly; you should head over to one of their Meetups to say hello, and talk about the dataset!
If you're looking for something a little more immediate, feel free to email Jacques.