Open Neighborhood Boundaries?
April 17th, 2008by Sean Gorman
About the Author: Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users.
Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this authorI got an email from the geowanking mailing list this morning that Mike Liebhold had posted about a talk at UC Berkeley on “Digital Neighborhood Mapping”. The talk is to be given by Factle Maps on their 15 step approach to creating neighborhood boundaries. I did a little digging into Factle Maps and found some interesting tidbits revolving around a dispute between them and Maponics about copyright infringement on data that landed in federal court. Another illustration of how ownership rights to data can get very messy and one of many reason we and many other have gone the open data route.
When it comes to neighborhoods Zillow created a great resource by releasing all their neighborhood boundaries as shapefiles under a creative commons license. The geowanking email got my attention because we’ve been mapping several attributes like political campaign contribution data to the Zillow neighborhood boundaries. As I did more searching I saw more feedback on the community’s frustrations with access to neighborhood data. Zillow addressed much of this with their release but there is still an issue with keeping it up to date and evolving the growth of it.
Seems like a natural opportunity for an Open Street Maps type approach fused with some easy polygon creation tools like ShapeWiki. We’ve kicked around having a general set of geometry editing tools, but this seems like a specific enough of a project to have a dedicated project built around it. Then you could map a variety of data to the new boundaries to provide context. Creating a tool to map data to arbitrary boundaries would be doable as long as the right math and rule set was implemented. Random thought for the day.
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April 17th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
it’s something we’ve thought about for a long time, but one needs to establish credibility–who defines what, what makes them an expert, etc…this is the fundamental problem in defining ‘opinions’ as fact. poly creation tools are secondary and i wonder what’s the real value in such a project? i’m all for open projects, but i don’t know what problem it solves. We offer a free API at urban mapping so developers can find point within poly. we’re the closest to a standard as you can get with all portals and IYPs.
also, i had ‘off the map’ on the Umiblog before you did! shame on you, sean!
April 18th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I put all the blame on the marketing folks
I think the argument is the same as why do you need open street maps when you have NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas. I think OSM proves the model that you do not need to be autocratic in defining boundaries of geographic features. Especially in something as nebulous as neighborhood boundaries there is no better expert than the “local”. Sure you’ll have disputes but I think the OSM model has show resiliency to it. I do not think this impinges on Urban Mapping just as OSM did little to impact TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ’s business. If anything it reinforces how important what they do is. Has Urban Mapping thought about creating a feedback mechanism on their data like TomTom does for driving directions. It would be an interesting model to blend expert and crowd sourced model. A local can submit a boundary or suggest and edit but it is not published till verified by the expert.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:50 am
I just saw this post, so my apologies for joining the conversation late. In my mind, one of the biggest benefits to an open set of neighborhood boundaries is the resulting innovation. For example, a site such as TeachStreet (which just launched) probably would not have integrated a neighborhood search (at least at this early stage) if the data had to be licensed.
Sean-
One thing we are doing as a result of feedback we received is to add the ability to lookup a neighborhood for a specific property into our API, which will make it far easier to build an application that can return a neighborhood name and then give the option to the user to tag that property as a different neighborhood if incorrect. Obviously, there is still back-end work after capturing that data, but it’s certainly a good start in my opinion.
If something like open streets is organized for neighborhoods, we’re happy to discuss the possibility of different licensing of our neighborhood boundaries to help that effort succeed.