In the beginning

I created this blog. I want to document my progress on computer science Master's project.

The idea is to create a navigation service based on street parking.

Some preliminary research presented various efforts by others that are relevant.

Someone created an app called Park Safe LA, which provides helpful information about colored curbs and understanding complicated parking signs. It does the latter by showing examples of single, double, triple, etc parking signs, and I guess ways to read it. Not very interesting. The interesting part comes from the creator's intention of having users take pictures of parking signs, and delivering results that tell you relevant information.

There is a parking app that uses GPS coordinates to determine where you are, and then tell you about parking information at your location. It has a feature of taking pictures of the sign, which makes it seem like it uses that pictoral information, but apparently it just uses the GPS coordinate and references a database that NYC provides.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/datafeeds.shtml#ParkingReg

This information that NYC provides seems very useful. They claim to update monthly, and have parking regulation information for every block in the city. I think I could use this to completely bypass the hard work of finding imagery of parking signs, extracting the text, then interpreting it. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an equivalent database for LA.

I sent an email LADOT to see if they have an equivalent database. If they do, perfect. If not, I see two potential paths.

1. Explore trying to "scrape" Google Street View and extract the images of parking signs. Then do the necessary processing.

or

2. Do this for NYC.