Zillow Releases Neighborhood Boundaries
Zillow Labs has released the neighborhood boundaries of almost 7,000 US neighborhoods and 150 cites. The data is being shared under a Share-Alike, Attribution-Required Creative Commons license. On the detail page you'll be able to find "zipped neighborhood boundary file for each state in the shapefile geographic format".
This comes just a week after Urban Mapping released their free neighborhood API (Radar post). Suddenly the geo community has two neighborhood APIs to choose from. The reality is that they overlap in functionality (UM has more neighborhoods and is easy to use for neogeographers, while Zillow has released boundaries) and they will most likely be used together -- after somebody does the work of syncing them.
(via GeoWanking via Spatially Adjusted)
tags: geo, web 2.0
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Comments: 5
I think it is very important for all of us in the open information community to applaud this action. We need more private companies to view public information as part of a more public commons and release their public data under good license terms.
I hope other companies start copying this sort of behavior!
-josh
One point of correction to your post, Brady, is that Zillow has released a downloadable form of the data that "frees" the data from the control of any one company (such as the Urban Mapping Project's API). By releasing the data in the way it did (download under a fairly open CC license), Zillow is guaranteeing that the data has a chance of surviving long after the company itself (no offense intended) or the web servers it is hosted on.
-josh
Just as a followup to Josh K - there's a big difference between the two releases.
The only people who can 'sync' the data as Brady implies, are the Urban Mapping folks, since their TOS says that "Subscribers are expressly forbidden from reverse engineering any code or software licensed hereby or otherwise determining geographic coordinates via this service"
Has anyone taken the time to do a more comprehensive analysis of the data in terms of accuracy, completeness, etc.? Seems like by now someone must have done this before incorporating it.
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Justin Martenstein [01.18.08 09:33 AM]
I was just about to email this to you. Glad to see you already caught it!