ESA Small & Medium Sized Enterprises Interactive Map
Since I created the ESA contractor map in November 2014 I've been surprised to see that I seem to get regular traffic to it.
Below is a snippet from my original post
Recently I had some business on the European Space Agency (ESA) SME Database. This database lists small and medium sized companies that have been cleared or granted privileges to work as contractors for the ESA.
The primary public access to this database is a long tabular list of company names and addresses. This data can be better presented today by overlaying it on an interactive map instead of a list. Using such a format can also make it easier for people to browse and investigate opportunities in specific areas.
So, in the spirit of being the change you want to see, I set out to create an offline parser (.NET) to source the list of companies from the SME database and then a simple PHP website to render the results onto a nice modern map (in this case Google Maps).
Since then I have made some infrequent updates to this web app and its features. I must admit that when I built this first I did not really expect anyone to find or actually use this tool (beside myself). Thus I was not overly concerned with tracking how often the underlying SME database changes on the ESA side and the project doesn't really have any built in stats tracking that (yet).
Nor did I invest in the effort to fully automate the extraction and parsing of the data from the SME database. This code to produce and prepare the background data all lives in a C# application that currently I need to run manually to get the updated lists of companies and fields.
The update
I noticed a few visits to the page today from a mobile client and decided out of curiosity to launch an update on the underlying data. I was surprised at the number of new and updated entries that were located. Given the amount of changes and the fact that when I viewed this page on my mobile it had a pretty annoying UI bug that needed fixing (the sole visitor today must have run into this same annoyance).
In addition to fixing a few bugs, I also introduced a change list section. This section is shown in the lower right hand corner of the map and lists the changes that I have made to the map source data.
I really should have such a visible change list in all of my applications. It is really handy to track what has changed and when.