Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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

Geospatial Semantic Web

The most value asset in a GIS system is data. Without data, a GIS system is like a computer system with the best peripherals but only with an empty hard drive — it’s useless. If data is so important, it is necessary for us to understand the role of data in the future GIS systems — i.e., the Geospatial Semantic Web.

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In the past, when the term “geospatial” is mentioned, people immediately think digitial maps. Today most people think Google Maps and Google Earth when the same term is mentioned. To me, seeing mapping technology as the sole component of geospatial technology is a nearsighted vision.

Geospatial technology is more than just pretty maps. A recent IDC study shows that the spatial information management industry is undergoing radical technology changes, which is likely to impact many IT ecosystems.

Fundamental shifts in the spatial information management industry
include basic changes in the nature of geospatial work, and transitions
in the broad IT environment toward easier integration and support for
business processes.

The study finds that geospatial data, and not the map, has
become the raw resource for creating location-specific information.
Therefore, efforts to convert paper maps to digital data have been
replaced as geospatial data is used to generate new maps, decisions,
and automated processes.

Let me take things one step further. I think a wide adoption of geospatial technology in IT is only the begnning. Some of the most exiciting applications in the future will be the ones that exploit geospatial semantics, not just geospatial data.