[Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[Steven Johnson]

Nathaniel Kelso & David Blackman's presentation at #sotmus on Quattroshapes
might offer some guidance, at least with respect to a method. They used
Foursquare checkins and geotagged Flickr photos to calculate some
boundaries. Now, I am more likely to check in at Arlington (my city) than I
am in East Falls Church (my neighborhood), but perhaps we could organize a
project around a similar method?

-- SEJ
-- twitter: @geomantic
-- skype: sejohnson8

There are two types of people in the world. Those that can extrapolate from
incomplete data.


On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 4:30 PM, stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

> OSM has pretty poor neighborhood coverage in the US. We have around 1100
>> place=neighbo[u]rhood. Geonames has ten times that at 11,000 (feature class
>> P.PPLX - not sure if all of those are neighborhoods) and Zillow has 7,000.
>> Both these data sets are provided under (different) CC licenses. Could we
>> use either Geonames or Zillow to drive improvement to neighborhood name
>> coverage in OSM? I am not proposing an import, but a local MapRoulette
>> challenge might work where people with local knowledge accept / reject
>> proposed neighborhood points, or something along those lines.
>>
>> Martijn
>>
>
> I don't use points (a POI with place=* or neighbourhood=* tag) but rather
> named polygons which surround/define a given named residential area.  These
> seem to work just as well:
>
> What I've done in my city is to get the (public domain) digital city data
> for how parcels are grouped together into polygons defining residential
> neighborhoods, with names in the name=* tag (and even numbers for each
> residential neighborhood, which I've put into the ref=* tag). These get an
> additional landuse=residential tag, and voilá, OSM (the database), mapnik
> and Nominatim all capture/display/index each neighborhood properly
> (Nominatim nicely and correctly as "Residential area.")
>
> The same data sets also contain outer-parcel-edge boundaries for
> commercial and industrial districts, which of course get landuse=commercial
> and landuse=industrial tags (respectively), as well as THEIR name=* (and
> ref=*) tags.  As a result, our city displays very nicely, all
> neighborhoods/districts show up in Nominatim, and the OSM database contains
> definitive, correct polygons, straight from a public domain source (the
> city GIS department).
>
> There are a very small number (two, three?) of "additional" data points
> which my neighbors use as community names (like "East Park" or "Midtown")
> which the city doesn't actually define, but people who live and/or work
> there do. For these, I use place=locality, name=* tags, and they render
> with a slightly different font (and smaller type size) than the
> neighborhoods/districts above.  For these, I place the point at a
> significant "cultural centroid" for those small sub-communities
> (place=suburb is too big, though I have also defined four of those in my
> city of 60,000 -- suburb points also display with distinct/different
> typeface/size, and at "certain" zoom levels which make it clear they are
> suburbs).  From both an "in the OSM DB" and a "how does mapnik display
> this" (in addition to how Nominatim indexes), I believe this is completely
> correct, and they look nice, too.   I sincerely believe anybody who lives
> in these neighborhoods would agree.
>
> I would guess many medium- and larger-sized cities have these sorts of
> datasets available: they are just big polygons that surround a neighborhood
> or commercial/industrial district: no "single point" required.  While these
> might take up more space in OSM's database, the extra points for the
> polygon-defining way makes them quite exact, and mapnik's rendering is in
> the very center of each polygon:  a nice way to do it.
>
> I invite you to take a look (within the City limits):
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?**lat=37&lon=-122&zoom=14&**layers=M<http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=37&lon=-122&zoom=14&layers=M>
>
> I don't think Zillow or Geonames should be leaned on too heavily (if at
> all) to define these: where neighborhoods begin and end is very much a
> local thing, and usually the City itself (or the County for unincorporated
> areas) or people who live locally are best at defining these.  That's why
> I'd say MapRoulette is a poor candidate for doing this:  you won't get
> local knowledge, you're just crowd-sourcing what effectively becomes an
> import among many, and they don't really know whether the data are high
> quality or not.
>
> SteveA
> California
>
>
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