[Talk-us-massachusetts] Massachusetts Neighborhood map

[Greg Troxel]

"Alan & Ruth Bragg" <alan.ruth.bragg at gmail.com> writes:

> With all this talk about villages I decided to look for West Bedford. It
> used to be a train stop in my town of Bedford.
> This link based on OSM, I wonder where they got the boundaries.

In OSM, West Bedford is place=hamlet.  That seems right, because I'd
expect the population that identifies as "in West Bedford" is quite
small compared to overall Bedford.

At least Stow (smaller than Bedford), is a place=village, with Lower
Village and Gleasondale place=bedford.

My impression is that place=city is supposed to be really big, as in
Masschusetts perhaps just Boston/Worcester/Lowell/Springfield (saying
that really roughtly).  There is no real linkage between "here we call
that level of government a foo" and "place=foo", as I understand it, and
this is confusing.

> https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ma/bedford/west-bedford

I would say that a place name like that does not have a precise
boundary.  At the concentration of what was the village long ago, it was
clear you were there, and then halfway to Concord pretty clear you
weren't, but no good place to draw a line.  Now, it's even more
confusing because we have continuous houses.

I have heard of some companies having neighborhood boundary data sets.
My impression is that caring about them being right in some geographer
sense wasn't important; it was about dividing up the world into
neighborhoods for precisely this kind of web site.