[Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[stevea]

>stevea, 
>Great work that you've done in your area with the neighborhood classification.
>
>I would just caution that deriving Neighborhood boundaries solely 
>from the governments could be problematic because they don't 
>represent the other stakeholders (mentioned earlier) and in the case 
>of Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood names designated by city planners 
>are used mostly for planning purposes and have little influence on 
>neighborhood identity reality on the ground.

I totally agree, and thank you for the kudos.  My little city (and 
the way that it looks in OSM) is (now) only a rough sketch.  I am an 
"early contributor."  That's why I'm casting a wide net with "seed 
examples" of both city-government defined districts (which DO have 
community input:  we have a vibrant and activist population who 
attend City Council meetings with a serious fervor) AND the "more 
vague" centroids of simple points that don't fit into a round hole as 
a the odd square peg named "Terrace Hill" or "Midtown."  (Alike. 
This needs broad brushes because there are broad strokes required to 
paint this canvas.  Thankfully, OSM accommodates, even in both 
standard rendering and indexing).

Communities ought to have multiple identities, such as the 
residential city-government consensus polygons I've mentioned, AND 
centroid points of vague "here is something the locals call it around 
her" alike.  All are in the db, all render, and all are shown in 
indexes, rather appropriately.  This is OK, if not pretty darn good.

>As darrell just mentioned, soliciting people to draw their 
>neighborhoods has been done in Boston by Andy Woodward as well as 
>Bill Morris in Burlington, Vt.
>
>As for tagging, as I understand, based on existing practice and 
>previous discussions - 
><http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2009-August/001437.html>lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2009-August/001437.html 
>and 
><http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2008-December/000594.html>lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2008-December/000594.html
>, neighborhoods within municipal limits, place=suburb is actually 
>the most appropriate based on the tag's description in the wiki and 
>d. place=neighbourhood was for smaller, distinct areas that would be 
>considered to be within an existing neighborhood (place=suburb) but 
>also be referred to by and additional name as well.
>An example of this in Cleveland would be Gordon Square within the 
>Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.

Workable, plastic, inventive and appropriate.  Excellent! (IMHO).

>Regarding Zillow, I'd hesitate to import them but only because of my 
>very limited experience of them (being Akron and Cleveland) where 
>their neighborhood names were derived from local government data 
>sets and in both cases were quite outdated and were representing the 
>reality for most within Cleveland.

Neighborhood definition across the rural/urban USA in a map like OSM 
(at least in these earlier years) is a fluid thing, it requires 
essentially constant input.  When and where we find we are "talking 
ourselves to death" we can back off.  Right now this is about weaving 
together strands that make a braid of consensus.  So far, so good.  I 
like the various approaches, I like the "attaboys," I like the 
multiple input.  Keep it up!  We are building a better national 
community about how better to do this by this dialog (multi-log?) 
here.

Capturing multiple semantics via slightly multiple syntax smears is 
OK.  We [can, might] sharpen focus later.

Three-hundred-million-plus at a time, I find it humbling to type like 
this.  I am just a simple human being.

SteveA
California
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