Who's on First: Adminstrative Boundaries and LocalitiesMartin Gamache, Art of the Mappable
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Mapzen
Who's on First is an open source gazeteer. Administrative level 2 and localities boundaries for countries outside North America and Europe where largely missing from this gazeteer. We have been collaborating on a project to populate or create these from open sources when available or secondary sources when necessary for most of the world. We have built polygons from point sources, scoured the internet for national mapping agency data, and compiled boundaries for dozens of countries around the world, helping create a true open source dataset that can be used for any purpose.
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Who ARE the People in your Neighborhood? Developing Mapzen's Neighborhood Database
Nat Case, INCase, LLC
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Mapzen
Mapzen's free and open
Who's on First is, like most gazetteers, a big list of places with stable identifiers in a place hierarchy, but we're modeling a new way to think about gazetteers: a space where debate about a place is managed but not decided. Neighborhoods are one of the included place types. In compiling data for this layer, we have encountered challenges in the range of city political structures, the relationship of city to sub-city entities, and in the lack of documentation and data for neighborhoods in many places. Our starting point was shapes derived from Flickr's neighborhood tags, but we discovered additional serious issues with the original compilation of those tags. We'll approach (and not necessarily resolve) these questions in a tour through cities big and small in the United States and around the world showing challenges faced and the final result on the map and in search.
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Mapping Regions with Partial BoundariesBrandon Plewe, Brigham Young University
Many regions, even official jurisdictions such as governments, have incomplete boundaries. That is, their boundary definitions reference features that do not close. While today such partial boundaries are usually limited to informal regions, prior to the era of scientific mapping and GIS they were the norm. Arbitrarily connecting them in a GIS polygon destroys the integrity of the original definition. When the boundaries are changing over time, the problem becomes even more complex. I will present possible solutions for representing changing partial boundaries honestly in GIS using an assertion-based data model, reasoning about them, and visualizing incomplete regions on maps.
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