[Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[Clifford Snow]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Your reply really doesn't address what William is saying, which is
> that neighbourhood boundaries are subjective. I think we all agree
> that neighbourhoods are useful, but they're worse than political
> boundaries in terms of being unsurveyable.
>

I agree that most neighborhood boundaries are subjective. Of the cities
I've lived in, some neighborhoods are clearly define, usually by natural or
man made artifacts, others are definitely fluid. When importing addresses
into Seattle we considered adding a neighborhood tag to each address or
building node but decided against it. Administrative boundaries seemed like
a better plan. After this discussion I'm not longer so certain.

So what are the pro and cons for importing boundaries?
Cons:
Neighborhood boundaries are fluid
Most neighborhood boundaries can not be surveyed
3rd party data users and overlay their own boundary polygons

Pros:
Helpful when doing queries
Search results show neighborhood boundaries
Irregularly shaped neighborhoods better depicted by a polygon than a node

Personally I don't have any objection if someone wanted to import
neighborhood boundaries for their city.

-- 
Clifford

OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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