[Talk-us] Retagging hamlets in the US

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:

> Seattle has very defined neighborhoods and even sub-neighborhoods.

As you imply, Seattle may be an exception (more detailed explanation below).

> 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.

There are some good reasons to not consider this.

First, there are a growing number of people who believe that
administrative data is very useful, but breaks OSM's "ground
observable" rule. That is, someone who is present on the ground should
be able to observe the data in OSM. It's usually not possible to do
that with administrative boundaries.

Of course adminstrative boundaries are things people care about, but
there's a growing number of people who believe that this data would be
best served from some other dataset and then used in conjunction with
OSM data during output (ie rendering, geocoding, etc.) rather than be
integrated into OSM itself.

The second reason to consider not entering neighborhood data into OSM
is that many towns and cities do not have hard and fast rules
regarding neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are subjective. Not only are
they subjective but neighborhoods have strong associations with issues
of personal identity, such as ethnicity socio-economic status.

In other words, a conflict between two people in regards to a
neighborhood can have larger implications.

Imagine if Bob and Alice conflict on where a neighborhood boundary is
inside OSM. The issue escalates to an edit war and the DWG is called
in to resolve the conflict. Let's say that Frank is our DWG member.
How is Frank supposed to resolve the conflict between Alice and Bob?
Often neighborhoods don't have administrative recognition, or
administrative recognition is not in alignment with the people. I
imagine this would be especially an issue with neighborhoods where
lots of the under-represented populations live.

I suspect you can see where this could all be problematic... That's
why I'm not in favor of this data being inside OSM. I think it'd be
better for a different dataset that OSM tools can then consume.

- Serge