Lands Protection Act Applications + RSS

One of the roles of the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (IRAC) is to oversee the administrative aspects of amendment and cancellation applications under the Lands Protection Act. In short, this means that they handle the paperwork when land owners wish to have their land “de-identified” for non-development; this is traditionally undertaken when owners of “identified” agricultural land want to subdivide it, or use it for commercial or industrial purposes.

Once IRAC’s administrative role is complete, the applications go to the Department of Community Services for decision by the Minister and an Executive Council Order is made pursuant to that decision.

IRAC has helpful page on its website that allows a search of processed applications. If you’re interested in following the activity in this area, however, you need to regularly visit the website to check for new applications. This is an area where RSS could be quite handy, so I’ve created an experimental RSS feed of processed applications.

The RSS feed is generated by scraping the data from the IRAC website, dumping it into a database, sorting in reverse chronological order of decision date, and then spitting out the most recent 25 processed applications. Here’s what it looks like in NetNewsWire:

In theory, thus, every time a new application is processed and added to IRAC’s database, the RSS feed should show it as the latest item.

IRAC offers permissions for use of its information in this manner, with the following proviso:

Information on this Web Site is made available by the Commission for the purpose of public information and research. The Commission hereby grants permission to use the information provided it is accurately reproduced and an acknowledgement of the source is given. The information may not be sold or offered for sale without the express written authorization of the Commission.

Note that, at present, the RSS feed doesn’t include “Corporate and Non-Resident Applications.”