Property Boundaries Service

This service manages a database and an API to serve data from the land registry's INSPIRE polygon and company ownership data. The service also has a pipeline that, when run, updates the database with the latest land registry data and backs up old data.

Requirements

• NodeJS
• MySQL
• GDAL tools (includes the ogr2ogr command line tool)
• PM2

Installing and deploying

See docs/deployment.md.

Useful dev commands

• npx sequelize-cli db:migrate:undo:all && npx sequelize-cli db:migrate to reset database migrations
• npm run dev:serve to start the server responding to API requests.
• npm run build && npm run plot to plot some of the analysis after a pipeline has run

Ownerships + INSPIRE updates pipeline

All of the pipeline-related code is in the src/pipeline directory. The pipeline can be triggered by an API request like this:

https://<property boundaries service api url>/run-pipeline?secret=<secret>

or the pipeline can be started with additional options (see PipelineOptions for details), e.g.:

https://<property boundaries service api url>/run-pipeline?secret=<secret>&startAtTask=analyseInspire&updateBoundaries=true

Analysing the output

A pipeline always updates the Land Ownership data (this is the fast, easy bit of the pipeline). Once the updateOwnerships task is complete, the new data should be visible in LX for all users.

After the downloadOwnerships task, a LX super user can see the pending INSPIRE polygons that have been downloaded in a separate, secret data layer.

If the updateBoundaries param is true, the analyseInspire task will write the pending polygons that are accepted as a successful match into the DB, so that they're visible for all users. Further detailed output for the pipeline can be found in the analysis folder in the project's root folder. This output can help you manually investigate something further e.g. if you want to investigate a failed match:

• find the details in failed-matches.json and copy a lat-lng of a vertex
• login to LX as a super user (to become a super user, update your record in MySQL on the server)
• enable the Pending Polygons data layer
• search for the lat-lng in the LX search bar, then click on nearby properties to visualise the polygon(s) involved