On 15/11/2019 18:38, Owen Boswarva wrote:
Hi Steve,
Do you mean this? https://visual.parliament.uk/msoanames
Recently completed, but the House of Commons Library did request
suggested names back in January when it was in draft.
The problem with census areas, at any level, is that they don't
necessarily coincide with the way that people actually perceive their
neighbourhoods. In rural areas, civil parishes tend to be a reasonable
proxy for the answer people would give to the question "Where do you
live?", but not always. In cities, ward names can be a guide, but often
aren't.
From a commercial perspective, this is something that is particularly
important in the property market. For example, Zoopla, Rightmove and
OnTheMarket have all created a database of named neighbourhoods that can
be used in a location search. But they don't agree with each other 100%.
And, of course, it isn't open data.
Google also returns a locality name with a reverse geocode search. But
that, too, isn't open data (and requires a paid-for API key to query in
bulk). In rural areas, it coincides with at least one of the property
websites around 80% of the time, but hardly at all in major urban areas.
Royal Mail's dependent and double-dependent locality names in the PAF
are, where populated, the most likely to correspond with perceived
neighbourhood names (as, indeed, you would expect, as they're derived
from historical usage themselves). But that's not open data either, and
is also costly to access.
The obvious open data route, of using a proximity search to names
already in OSM (or OS OpenNames), turns out not to work very well at all
- mainly because simple distance takes no account of physical barriers
such as rivers and roads, which often form the boundaries of perceived
localities. You need to define your boundaries as well as assigning your
names, and very few neighbourhoods and localities are anything near
circular.
I'm not aware of any crowdsourced database, although I've often
considered trying to create one. But even there, you run up against the
problem that people may not agree among themselves as to the name of
their locality.
Mark
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