Ask HN: Free Neighborhood Boundary Data?

7 points·neovive··7 comments

I'm working on a directory project and would like to allow users to search within various city neighborhoods. I have the lat, lng for the various businesses, but was unable to find any freely available neighborhood data sets to correlate the geo data with neighborhoods.

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Update: Just find this page from Zillow (http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm). It's in the shape file format.

These are difficult to find. In the past, I have found these in individual city GIS department websites, but haven't found a single source that aggregates lots of cities. Quality and formats tend to vary as well.

That's what I'm finding as well. I searched through the Census site and found PUMA references and was able to find some neighborhood data and various local university library pages, but no single source with everything -- besides expensive commercial data sets.

Have you checked out SimpleGeo? I believe their places have Neighborhood info available but not sure if you can filter on it.

Looks interesting. Their context database seems to have the neighborhood data. Thanks.

I've never used it, but I know Yelp has one (http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/neighborhood_ap...).

Ordnance Survey OpenData is rather comprehensive. The licence (AFAIK, IANAL) allows free commercial and non-commercial use, as long as you attribute the data to them.

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/.html

It has boundaries for Counties, Cities, Electoral Constituencies and Wards, Civic Parishes, and probably other divisions, too.

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