[Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[Martijn van Exel]

I agree with the advantage of polygons when performing queries of the type
'show me all bakeries in this neighborhood'. This will however only work if
that neighborhood is clearly defined in terms of boundaries. If we agree
that this is not the case, we are just going to be creating confusion and
perhaps even edit wars when we settle on polygons for neighborhoods. A node
location for a neighborhood is something locals should be able to
relatively easily agree on. I think we can see much faster progress
proceeding along that avenue.

I think that we should show great restraint with importing any more
boundary polygons. They make mapping more difficult and confusing, for
example because they often overlap with roads. They do not represent
surveyable / verifiable data in many cases, which makes for dead data,
which we have enough of in the US.

Back to my original question, rephrased slightly - would there be a legal
impediment to use Zillow or Geonames data to derive neighborhood point data
to increase coverage in OSM?

Why I care - because neighborhood data represents just what makes OSM
unique - local knowledge. Why use external sources then you say? Well, the
point would be to make it easy for locals to add neighborhood data to OSM,
by offering a data starting point.

Martijn


On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us>wrote:

>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>
>


-- 
Martijn van Exel
http://oegeo.wordpress.com/
http://openstreetmap.us/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20130612/128e0d65/attachment-0001.html>