Conference Paper

Yardi Systems is the world leader in providing property management software solutions.
PropertyShark.com and Point2Homes.com are two of Yardi’s products which focus on the U.S. real estate market. They provide a variety of information related to properties for both the commercial and the residential sectors making use of the great visual help of the maps, created at the Cluj Napoca office in Romania.
The main element of each step, in the process of creating and updating our maps is an open source program. First we prepare the data manually with the help of well-known open source GIS-desktop software or, when necessary, we process the data automatically with python scripts. Maps configuration and styling are accomplished in Map Server 6 .2 and the visualization and error checks are done in GeoMoose. Next we pre-render the maps in tiles using Image Magick and we store and serve the maps on the web from MySQL databases.
The entire process is optimized with perl scripts. All of these help us keep up to date over 3400 maps and allow us to easily add a lot of new maps on www.propertyshark.com and www.point2homes.com