OpenStreetMap

Be Bold?

Posted by atchius on 25 May 2014 in English.

I’m applying the “be bold” principle from Wikipedia, hopefully that flies here and I’m not disturbing anybody in the community.

I’m going to draw out areas for all 52 neighborhoods in Cincinnati. As best I can tell, the neighborhoods are currently each represented by a single node “place:borough” in roughly the center of the neighborhood. This might work well for some cities, but Cincinnati’s neighborhoods are objective and have defined borders (even if some borders are disputed). So we can definitely make things more accurate!

I’ve never really done anything on OpenStreetMap before, but I’m really excited to dive in. So please stop me if I’m doing something wrong!

I plan to draw the area using shared nodes from streets, waterways, parks, and other existing features. There are probably very few neighborhood lines in Cincinnati that don’t follow physical objects or property lines. I’ll tag sources as I go, and I’ll also add population data, community websites, Wikipedia articles, and other accompanying information whenever possible.

So far I’ve done my home neighborhood of Camp Washington. It went better than I expected. Still getting used to this browser-based editor, but I don’t think I’m committing any serious errors.

Location: Camp Washington, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, 45225, United States

Discussion

Comment from Chris Fleming on 25 May 2014 at 20:20

I did the same in the area I live (Edinburgh, Scotland) well worth doing, makes a big improvement to anyone doing reverse geo coding in those areas.

I actually used JOSM and did the changes as completely new ways and using the mapnik layer as a background. I decided this would be easier to work with as I expected others to refine the areas and later. But I guess if the area is distinctly defined by features then using these also makes sense.

Comment from Endres Pelka on 25 May 2014 at 21:56

Please do not make shared nodes with other features. Neighborhoods should share nodes only with other neighborhoods. By the way, are these borders you make administrative? Then you should use boundary relations for it.

Comment from Minh Nguyen on 25 May 2014 at 23:20

Hi atchius, welcome to our little corner of OpenStreetMap!

In Cincinnati, we started out by mapping each neighborhood as a place=suburb POI, but only as a first step. Recognizing that Cincinnati neighborhoods have definite administrative boundaries (with occasional controversy over those boundaries), we’ve demarcated CUF, Clifton, and University Heights with relations tagged as boundary=administrative admin_level=10 border_type=neighborhood. Even so, we still need to keep the place=suburb node because many map renderers use it to position the label.

As always, you can find more information on the wiki. In particular, in Ohio, we mostly do join administrative boundaries to roads and other features when they are legally defined to go down the road centerline. Laws are different in every jurisdiction, though, so this is not the usual OSM convention.

We’re really glad to see you help out. Please let Nate or me know if you have any questions.

Comment from dalek2point3 on 26 May 2014 at 17:06

what do people think about using the Zillow neighborhood boundaries? http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm

has there been a discussion around this? Its under CC-BY-SA (not sure if that’s compatible)

Comment from JohnDoe23 on 26 May 2014 at 17:13

CC-BY-SA is not compatible with OpenStreetMap (Odbl)

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