I'm really intrigued by this conversation. Neighborhood identity is subjective - collectively defined by residents and stakeholders (businesses, and other organizations) within and outside of the neighborhood as well as governments, politicians, and the media. Nonetheless, I believe they belong in OpenStreetmap because they are an important part of capturing what may not physically be on the ground but the name is represented in discussion and the neighborhood may have characteristics unique to its bordering neighborhoods (housing types, types of businesses, socioeconomic status, local business types, and obviously, local geographic features - lakes, rivers, etc)
Given the subjective, fluid nature of neighborhoods - especially boundaries - where one neighborhood ends and one begins - may change from person to person, they are best represented as a single node in the area where there is greatest consensus that the neighborhood is located. This can be very roughly estimated by OSM mappers who locally live in or near the area. stevea, Great work that you've done in your area with the neighborhood classification. I would just caution that deriving Neighborhood boundaries solely from the governments could be problematic because they don't represent the other stakeholders (mentioned earlier) and in the case of Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood names designated by city planners are used mostly for planning purposes and have little influence on neighborhood identity reality on the ground. As darrell just mentioned, soliciting people to draw their neighborhoods has been done in Boston by Andy Woodward as well as Bill Morris in Burlington, Vt. As for tagging, as I understand, based on existing practice and previous discussions - lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2009-August/001437.html and lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2008-December/000594.html , neighborhoods within municipal limits, place=suburb is actually the most appropriate based on the tag's description in the wiki and d. place=neighbourhood was for smaller, distinct areas that would be considered to be within an existing neighborhood (place=suburb) but also be referred to by and additional name as well. An example of this in Cleveland would be Gordon Square within the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. Regarding Zillow, I'd hesitate to import them but only because of my very limited experience of them (being Akron and Cleveland) where their neighborhood names were derived from local government data sets and in both cases were quite outdated and were representing the reality for most within Cleveland. Regards, Will
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