Ottawa Development Tracker

[sleye]

Long-time lurker, (very) occasional poster.

I’ve always enjoyed following project threads, but over time I found two things a bit frustrating:

• Digging through dozens of pages in a thread to find the project renders
• Keeping track of smaller proposals that don’t make it to the forum

As a side project, I put together Ottawa Development Tracker. It pulls development proposals city-wide and automatically collects the renders so they’re easier to find in one place.

It’s very much a work in progress but hopefully a more useful reference tool than the City's devapp page. If anyone has suggestions, corrections, or notices anything missing, I’d be happy to hear it.

[SL123]

Pretty cool project you've been working on! Good job

[rocketphish]

Coincidentally, I stumbled onto your site yesterday while searching for an old project rendering. The site looks good and it's a great first effort. I also like the mapping and the search function.

Automating the rendering extraction and publishing process is a great idea, but it looks like it needs a bit more work. Many of the projects I looked at showed clunky early renderings or massing diagrams instead of renderings, or unimportant renderings, or even imagery that weren't renderings at all (site servicing plans and details, for example). I think that if you can refine the image recognition process so it is more focused on just overall building renderings, and is scoped to just certain documents (Planning Rationale, Design Brief, Elevations, Architectural Plans, UDRP Submission, etc.) you might get more relevant results.

Keep up the good work... this has great potential!

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by sleye

Long-time lurker, (very) occasional poster.

I’ve always enjoyed following project threads, but over time I found two things a bit frustrating:

• Digging through dozens of pages in a thread to find the project renders
• Keeping track of smaller proposals that don’t make it to the forum

As a side project, I put together Ottawa Development Tracker. It pulls development proposals city-wide and automatically collects the renders so they’re easier to find in one place.

It’s very much a work in progress but hopefully a more useful reference tool than the City's devapp page. If anyone has suggestions, corrections, or notices anything missing, I’d be happy to hear it.

Wow.......that is a labour of love. I'm sure City staff will be looking at this a lot

[Uhuniau]

DAMN!

That's some fancy work, and is a massive research time-saver!

[sclement12]

Cool indeed! Something to note is the address mapping isn't working as it should. Currently, 1420-1424 Earl Armstrong Rd./110 Laurier Ave. W. is showing up on the map as a development proposal at City Hall but it should be Riverside South.

[sleye]

Thanks everyone for the kind words! I have a long list of things to improve and add, so it's great to hear Development Tracker is already useful.

Originally Posted by rocketphish

Automating the rendering extraction and publishing process is a great idea, but it looks like it needs a bit more work. Many of the projects I looked at showed clunky early renderings or massing diagrams instead of renderings, or unimportant renderings, or even imagery that weren't renderings at all (site servicing plans and details, for example). I think that if you can refine the image recognition process so it is more focused on just overall building renderings, and is scoped to just certain documents (Planning Rationale, Design Brief, Elevations, Architectural Plans, UDRP Submission, etc.) you might get more relevant results.

Keep up the good work... this has great potential!

Very cool that you found it yesterday I absolutely agree. The rendering extraction isn't as good as I'd like it to be. Improving it is on my shortlist of things to work on next.

Originally Posted by sclement12

Cool indeed! Something to note is the address mapping isn't working as it should. Currently, 1420-1424 Earl Armstrong Rd./110 Laurier Ave. W. is showing up on the map as a development proposal at City Hall but it should be Riverside South.

Good catch! It's weird that the city included 110 Laurier Ave. W. as an address for this project. I've fixed the address mapping for this and related projects. Thanks for pointing it out!

[sgera]

amazing - nicely done.

[sleye]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

Automating the rendering extraction and publishing process is a great idea, but it looks like it needs a bit more work. Many of the projects I looked at showed clunky early renderings or massing diagrams instead of renderings, or unimportant renderings, or even imagery that weren't renderings at all (site servicing plans and details, for example). I think that if you can refine the image recognition process so it is more focused on just overall building renderings, and is scoped to just certain documents (Planning Rationale, Design Brief, Elevations, Architectural Plans, UDRP Submission, etc.) you might get more relevant results.

Keep up the good work... this has great potential!

I've completed a major upgrade to the image extraction process and reprocessed all the projects. You should see much more relevant renders now and going forward.

Thanks again for the feedback!

[misterg]

This is awesome great job! A nice to have but not a need to have would be having a column for floors or height where you can sort by floor count/height. Just a thought but otherwise I will definitely be frequenting this

[sleye]

Originally Posted by misterg

This is awesome great job! A nice to have but not a need to have would be having a column for floors or height where you can sort by floor count/height. Just a thought but otherwise I will definitely be frequenting this

Thanks! That's a great suggestion. It may take me awhile to get it working reliably, but I've added it to my roadmap!

[sleye]

Originally Posted by misterg

This is awesome great job! A nice to have but not a need to have would be having a column for floors or height where you can sort by floor count/height. Just a thought but otherwise I will definitely be frequenting this

This ended up being much trickier than expected to do reliably!

I have it working pretty well now. I've added the column to sort by number of floors on the table of projects. I've also added dedicated pages for high-rise, mid-rise and low-rise developments.

I hope it's useful. Thanks again for the feedback!