[Talk-us] Retagging hamlets in the US

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2015-03-19 15:12, Clifford Snow wrote:
> Looking at King County, especially Seattle, it appears that a number of
> the place=hamlet are actually neighborhoods. We have been reluctant to
> add neighborhood borders because of prior discussions on the mailing
> list which, in essence, believe that neighborhoods don't have defined
> borders. While I believe Seattle and others do have defined borders, I
> really don't want to fight this all over.

If I remember correctly, the controversy was about whether municipal 
boundaries belong in OSM, not whether they ever exist. The argument was 
that concrete boundaries are products of government agencies and not 
readily improved by OSM's volunteer mappers, which I disagreed with. [1] 
But certainly many large cities have internal administrative boundaries.

For example, Cincinnati is divided into 52 "neighborhoods" -- not mere 
business districts or voting wards. [2] Their boundaries are defined 
precisely along major streets. The city marks many of these boundaries 
with welcome signs or other decorative elements. Residents know which 
neighborhood they live in. They have community councils and websites. [3][4]

Given these facts, those of us mapping Cincinnati have been quite happy 
to map admin_level=10 boundaries where we happen to know them. For the 
other neighborhoods, a simple place=suburb POI will suffice until 
someone comes along with more info.

Many of Cincinnati's neighborhoods also contain smaller, less formal 
areas like business districts and residential developments. We've been 
mapping them with a mixture of landuse polygons and place=neighbourhood 
POIs.

How does this compare to Seattle? Do its neighborhoods have a similar 
level of organization? The GNIS place=hamlet POIs in Cincinnati mostly 
fell into the latter bucket, but we turned some into place=suburb and a 
few turned out to be historical.

[1] 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2013-January/010162.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cincinnati_neighborhoods
[3] 
http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/community-development/references-resources/community-council-directory/
[4] There have even been boundary disputes between community councils.

> My suggestion is to encourage people to clean up place=hamlet from local
> knowledge. I fully concur with Richard Weait that we need to attract
> more mappers.

When it comes to place=hamlet POIs outside major urban areas, I suspect 
that we're looking for *hyper*local knowledge. I can verify the 
existence of Cincinnati neighborhoods that I've never visited, because 
they come up plenty on the local news. But I have no clue one way or 
another about some suburban place=hamlet POIs just a few miles from 
where I lived.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us