Free US neighborhood boundary data from Zillow
Zillow, an online real estate service company, is giving away 7000+ neighborhood boundary data in the ESRI Arc Shapefile format.
The boundary lines for over 7,000 neighborhoods around the United States covering roughly 150 cities. These neighborhood shapes are now available, zipped up in the Arc Shapefile format, for anyone to download.
By open source the data to the public, Zillow hopes the public can help it to improve the quality of the data. The accuracy of boundary line data is really important to Zillow’s real estate web service.
Additionally, it’s a way for people to use and contribute to our growing database to help improve the boundary lines, though you do have to have some GIS technical knowledge (note that you’ll need ArcGIS software to work with the actual shapefiles). After all, we don’t know Phoenix like a local agent does nor do we know Boston like a Boston resident does. If your city is not one of the 150 cities covered currently, and you know enough GIS (or have access to someone who does), you can draw your own boundaries for your city and notify us by posting a thread in Zillow Discussions. We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.
This is a great news to those are interested in free geospatial data. I think Geonames probably can make use of this dataset.
Spotted on the All Points Blog
Harry
You are right, it is a very interesting data set and we have added a reverse geocoding service based upon it. We cannot fully integrate it into GeoNames due to license restrictions. GeoNames is a cc-by project whereas the zillow data set is cc-by-sa. More info in this blog posting :
http://geonames.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/neighbourhood-reverse-geocoding/
Marc
Comment by Marc — January 24, 2008 @ 4:42 am
Hi. I should point out that you don’t actually need ArcGIS software to work with shapefiles. You can load and host shapefiles using GeoServer. Also, there are other free utilities that you can use to view them, such as QGIS and uDig.
GeoServer: geoserver.org
QGIS: http://www.qgis.org
uDig: udig.refractions.net
Comment by Mike Pumphrey — May 12, 2008 @ 3:15 pm