Get the Data - API
Planning application data is available programmatically as feeds which can be used in most web mapping APIs and desktop GIS software like mapufacture and Yahoo Pipes. Details of the API are listed below.
All the API calls listed below return planning application sorted by the date they were scraped from the planning authority website with the most recent listed first. They will return a maximum of 100 results. To retrieve more results simply append "&page=[2,3,etc..]" to the url.
By appending "&style=html" to the end of the url it will return an html formatted description in the georss feed rather than the default plain text. This is especially useful when a georss feed is embedded in a map as in the examples below.
The API can return different formats including GeoRSS, JSON and human readable HTML. The examples below all return GeoRSS. To get JSON instead simply replace ".rss" in the URL with ".js". To return HTML simply remove the ".rss" suffix completely.
API documentation
Single Location by address
Return applications near a given street address. The area included is a circle with a radius of the given size (in metres) with the address at its center. Suggested sizes are 400, 800 or 4000 metres.
http://www.planningalerts.org.au/applications.rss?address=[address]&radius=[distance_in_metres]
Single Location by longitude/latitude
Return applications near a given longitude/latitude. The area included is a circle with a radius of the given size (in metres) with the longitude/latitude at its center. Suggested sizes are 400, 800 or 4000 metres.
http://www.planningalerts.org.au/applications.rss?lat=[latitude]&lng=[longitude]&radius=[distance_in_metres]
Area by longitude/latitude
Return applications within a rectangle defined by longitude/latitude.
http://www.planningalerts.org.au/applications.rss?bottom_left_lat=[latitude]&bottom_left_lng=[longitude]&top_right_lat=[latitude]&top_right_lng=[longitude]
Planning authority
Return applications for a specific planning authority (e.g. a local council) by authority short name. To discover the authority short name to use here, find the planning authority on the list of authorities and follow the link. The url has the authority short name in it.
http://www.planningalerts.org.au/authorities/[name]/applications.rss
Postcode
Return applications for a specific postcode area
http://www.planningalerts.org.au/applications.rss?postcode=[postcode]
Suburb
Return applications in a suburb. Including "state" in the search is optional.
http://www.planningalerts.org.au/applications.rss?state=[state]&suburb=[suburb]
License information
Data via the api is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.