[Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[stevea]

Bryce Cogswell writes:
>Your entire argument is based on the premise that neighborhood 
>boundaries are subjective and unverifiable, and while that may be 
>true for your neighborhood it is not true for mine. So why shouldn't 
>I map what I can easily verify on the ground?

+1:  this is true for me as well, so I agree.  Well, it is verifiable 
by what our local government says (through the consensus of public 
process, like City Council meetings) via polygons, AND by the more 
vaguely-defined but still useful nodes, of which there are several in 
my city.  This both democratizes and harmonizes neighborhoods without 
making defining all of them a free-for-all (in my city, anyway -- in 
yours, well, there are both good and bad examples in OSM).

For the former, I don't need a painted line on the ground, just what 
the City GIS department publishes on the open Internet, after these 
lines/polygons/neighborhood boundaries were reached by public 
process.  For the latter, these are fluid enough that they can come 
and go, move and change name.  Once again:  OSM accommodates by 
storing, displaying (uniquely!) and indexing both types of data.

While this discussion is good, I don't think a "one polygon (or one 
node) fits all" solution will work across the very wide diversity of 
"neighborhoods" in the USA.  Accordingly, let us allow some minor 
small smears of syntax (multiple solutions) to capture multiple 
semantics.  It doesn't hurt anything, and nobody pretends there is a 
standard way to "properly map" every single thing in OSM we wish to 
map, just high-quality representations of things (which are all of 
captured in the database, rendered, and indexable).  Both polygons 
and nodes for neighborhoods do all three of those, and sometimes a 
polygon is better than a node (or vice versa), so I continue to 
believe using both is OK.

SteveA
California