I would like to create a map-based location selector - something like this but with a map to the side.
For each stage of the drill down, the options are represented not just as options in a select box but polygons on a map.
I am pretty stunned that in this day an age something like this does not exist.
Surely the data on this site could be used to make such a thing?
I have the ability to do this myself, but was wondering whether it had been done already before I embarked on this task.
Personally, I would be using MySQL Geospatial Extensions to store the polygon data and a "nested set" technique to make selection of all children of a given area computationally trivial.
The map would be Google Maps API v3 (Or possibly MapStraction?) I would then use Javascript and AJAX to populate the data.
If this hasn't been done before, would anyone be interested in joining me in this project? I think a downloadable framework to include such a widget on people's sites would be a great addition to this site - if we could maybe write some code that automatically parsed the kmz files from this site and built the database, it wouldn't be much work for the administrators of this site to add the SQL dump to the list of downloads.
If interested, please feel free to email me at evilc evilc com