PROBLEM
I live in Lausanne, Switzerland, and I would like to buy a home in the next years or so. The market is so hot that as soon as a new home is on the market it gets sold in days. Hence I would like to have a clear vision of the homes that are going to be build in the next years. Luckily enough the city in which I live is providing such information through a website:
MY APPROACH
If you go to that page you will see a map of the canton of Vaud. In the main menu click on Thème: Localisation > Permis de construire
Now under Données on the right side menu untick "Zone d'affectation"
If you zoom on Lausanne you will now have a map that looks like this:
This map is updated every 2 weeks and you will see new dots added and old dots leaving.
Before I start to write a custom web crawler in Python I would like to know if there is any solution out-of-the-box that could help me identify the difference between this map and how it was last month. A sort of diff command
for web pages.
OTHER OPTIONS
I'm dealing with the web page owner to see if the have an available API and they haven't replied me yet. That would be my solution.
Otherwise do you know what is the map used in this website? It doesn't look like OpenStreetMaps
to me. If I know the framework maybe I could understand how to reverse engineer the content of the page and maybe export in CSV, XML. JSON, etc...
YOUR APPROACH
I'm all ears, tell me how would you approach this problem or if you know any tool that could help me archive what I want.