[Talk-GB] Neighbourhood/LSOA Names

[Mark Goodge]

On 15/11/2019 18:38, Owen Boswarva wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> 
> Do you mean this? https://visual.parliament.uk/msoanames
> 
> Recently completed, but the House of Commons Library did request 
> suggested names back in January when it was in draft.

The problem with census areas, at any level, is that they don't 
necessarily coincide with the way that people actually perceive their 
neighbourhoods. In rural areas, civil parishes tend to be a reasonable 
proxy for the answer people would give to the question "Where do you 
live?", but not always. In cities, ward names can be a guide, but often 
aren't.

 From a commercial perspective, this is something that is particularly 
important in the property market. For example, Zoopla, Rightmove and 
OnTheMarket have all created a database of named neighbourhoods that can 
be used in a location search. But they don't agree with each other 100%. 
And, of course, it isn't open data.

Google also returns a locality name with a reverse geocode search. But 
that, too, isn't open data (and requires a paid-for API key to query in 
bulk). In rural areas, it coincides with at least one of the property 
websites around 80% of the time, but hardly at all in major urban areas.

Royal Mail's dependent and double-dependent locality names in the PAF 
are, where populated, the most likely to correspond with perceived 
neighbourhood names (as, indeed, you would expect, as they're derived 
from historical usage themselves). But that's not open data either, and 
is also costly to access.

The obvious open data route, of using a proximity search to names 
already in OSM (or OS OpenNames), turns out not to work very well at all 
- mainly because simple distance takes no account of physical barriers 
such as rivers and roads, which often form the boundaries of perceived 
localities. You need to define your boundaries as well as assigning your 
names, and very few neighbourhoods and localities are anything near 
circular.

I'm not aware of any crowdsourced database, although I've often 
considered trying to create one. But even there, you run up against the 
problem that people may not agree among themselves as to the name of 
their locality.

Mark