[Talk-us] NYC administrative boundaries and Nominatim

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Kevin Kenny <kkenny2 at nycap.rr.com> wrote:
> On 07/29/2012 11:56 PM, Skye Book wrote:
>
>>> Do we have a source for NYC administrative boundaries?
>
>
> http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/districtsmetadata.shtml

I'm not sure of the license situation with any of the NYC.gov
datasets. I've gotten different answers from different people I've
talked to. Some people in some offices say that it's fine as long as
we take certain steps, others say it's not, and others have different
views altogether.

I'm working to get some authoritative data on this.

While I'm generally not a big fan of imports, administrative boundries
are hard to do in another way, and as Richard Welty points out, it's
generally a good thing to replace these nodes with true polygons, and
then we can also use data sources to fill in population tags.

>>> And what are boroughs in terms of "place"? I'm thinking county- though
>>> that's not right. Certainly the populations should be added.
>
>
> The boroughs of New York are counties; confusingly, the borough names
> and the (coterminous) county names don't always match:
>
> Borough        County
>
> The Bronx      Bronx County
> Manhattan      New York County
> Staten Island  Richmond County
> Brooklyn       Kings County
> Queens         Queens County

Indeed that is confusing. Off the top of my head, I see two simple solutions:

1. We tag the areas as counties, but use the "common names" as the
primary name, and these official names as alt_name.

2. We create a new administrative relation that has the same geometry
as the county.

I would lean towards the first, as it means less data and more clarification.

Thoughts?

- Serge