Over on my Hacker in Residence blog I’ve been doing some experimenting with the City of Charlottetown zoning map, taking the raw map from the city, massaging the data and merging it with provincial civic address database information to end up with a Google Earth-friendly KML of the zoning map that makes it much easier to search for and visualize zoning.

So you can see the entire city, with each properly colour-coded by zone:

Or you can zoom in and turn off all the zoning other than “open space” to see where there’s parkland downtown:

What’s really nice is that because Google Earth is being used to view the information, all of the other Google Earth layers, from 3D buildings to Wikipedia annotations, can be overlaid:

You can get Google Earth for free from Google and the KML file for free from:

http://charlottetown.reinvented.net/zoning/charlottetown_zoning_enhanced.kml