Method and system for retrieving and serving regulatory history for a property

• US 8,271,431 B1
• Filed: 05/01/2009
• Issued: 09/18/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 03/08/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Unearthed Land Technologies LLC
• Original Assignee: Unearthed Land Technologies LLC
• Inventors: Carrington, Charles C.
• Primary Examiner(s): Jalil, Neveen Abel
• Assistant Examiner(s): Pandya, Jagdish
• Application Number:
  US12/434,489
• Time in Patent Office: 1,236 Days
• Field of Search: 707/E17.008, 707/603, 705/26, 705/35, 705/39
• US Class Current: 707/603
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/22 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24573 using data annotations, e.g. user-defined metadata
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/29 Geographical information databases
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9537 Spatial or temporal dependent retrieval, e.g. spatiotemporal queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/16 Real estate
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/163 Real estate management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/18 Legal services

Abstract

Described is a method and system for retrieving and serving the regulatory history of a property. An identification of data sources for permits and approvals is stored in a computer system. Property identifiers from the data sources are stored in the computer system. The system identifies the types of permit and approval data available from each of the data sources for each of the property identifiers. A determination can be made of the completeness of the regulatory history available for each property associated with each of said property identifiers. The system receives a request for the regulatory history of at least one of the properties associated with the property identifiers. A web page is populated with a list of the regulatory history for the property.

Claims

1. A method of determining a land use based regulatory history comprising:

crawling a plurality of remote computers over a communications network to build a local database, the plurality of remote computers being known to have land use based regulatory history data associated therewith;

storing, in the local database, remote computer identifications associated with each of the plurality of remote computers;

retrieving a plurality of real property identifiers from the plurality of remote computers over the communications network based upon the remote computer identifications, each of the plurality of real property identifiers having land use based regulatory history data associated therewith;

searching the local database for a given real property based upon a given real property identifier associated therewith to determine which of the plurality of remote computers has land use based regulatory history data available for the given real property;

determining whether the land use based regulatory history data available for the given real property is complete;

retrieving land use based regulatory history data from another remote computer over the communications network based upon at least one of the retrieved plurality of real property identifiers when the land use based regulatory history data available for the given real property is not complete, wherein the another remote computer has a remote computer identification different from the remote computer identifications associated with each of the plurality of remote computers; and

displaying the land use based regulatory history data for the given real property on a display.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the land use based regulatory history data available for the given real property is determined to be complete based upon at least one of a threshold amount of land use based regulatory history data and at least one of the remote computer identifications being from a predetermined one of the remote computers.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein the land use based regulatory history data comprises at least one of permit history data and approval history data.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein the land use based regulatory history data comprises types of the land use based regulatory history data;

and wherein determining whether the land use based regulatory history data is complete comprises determining whether the types of land use based regulatory history data for the given real property are complete based upon a threshold amount of types of land use based regulatory history data.

5. The method according to claim 1, further comprising generating an index of the land use based regulatory history data and the plurality of real property identifiers.

6. The method according to claim 1, wherein displaying the land use based regulatory history data for the given real property on the display comprises displaying the land use based regulatory history data for the real given property on a webpage on the display.

7. The method according to claim 1, wherein the plurality of remote computers comprises a plurality of web servers.

8. The method according to claim 1, wherein the communications network comprises the Internet.

9. The method according to claim 1, further comprising overlaying on the display data layers of GIS data from each of the plurality of remote computers.

10. The method according to claim 1, wherein at least one of the plurality of remote computers comprises a governmental authority database.