[Talk-us] Retagging hamlets in the US

[Clifford Snow]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 4:55 PM, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>
wrote:

> 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.


Seattle has very defined neighborhoods and even sub-neighborhoods. The
prior discussions kept us from adding the boundaries. Maybe it is time to
reconsider. The Mapzen effort to produce a boundaries overlay is a
promising solution to the problem, but I haven't heard anything from Mapzen
for a while.

Boundaries are often hard to identify, even between cities let alone
neighborhoods, yet they are import for many uses. Right now I'm in a city
that I can't tell where it begins and the next city to the north ends.
There doesn't seem to be a clear demarcation. But if we have access to
administrative boundaries, I believe they should be in OSM. (At least until
we have a viable alternative.)

At its most basic, OSM is a geospatial database. We have countries, states,
counties, and cities. Why not neighborhoods. OSM tells where a feature is
located. Points can only tell us how close a feature is to a node. Using
nodes to represent neighborhoods doesn't allow with any certainty where a
feature is located while a polygon can.

We are a slightly off topic, but place=hamlet has the same issue. The
problem is that not all place=hamlet have defined borders. For example,
"Edison Station" is a hamlet that is known by some locals, but there is no
defined boundary. At best it has very small radius, yet as a node, it might
cast a wider territory.

Clifford


-- 
@osm_seattle
osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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