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

The ESRI Federal User Conference (FedUC) is January 31–February 2, 2006, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The conference supports those who deploy ESRI software for geoprocessing and analysis, integrated work flows, and intelligent collaboration across government. (source blog)

Going through the program schedule (pdf), I see a lot of interesting application domain that could exploit Semantic Web technology. I think the use of ontologies and RDF can be useful in the following domains:

• Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure: the Year of Alignment (page 3)
• WMD Response in a Joint Civil and Military Environment (page 6)
• GIS for Homeland Security and Emergency Management (page 8 )
• Preserving GeoSpatial Data (page 12)

I’m quite disappointed to see the word “semantic” is not mentioned anywhere in the entire 27 pages document. The word “intergration” is mentioned is 15 times. Do people really believe that knowledge integration problems can be solved without some kind of understanding of the semantics?