So, what is a sub-location/neighborhood anyway?

[Greg Noel]

I've found a couple of, well, strange sub-location/neighborhoods recently.  This one took up over 10,000 acres until I redid the polygon to its actual boundaries.  And here's one that is probably supposed to be identical to this city, but is so sloppily drawn that it cuts houses in half and doesn't line up with adjacent communities.  That made me sensitive to potential problems with neighborhoods.  Then I found this neighborhood in downtown San Diego that contained almost no housing (one condominium building), with a name that apparently came from a redevelopment project that developed the downtown mall.

Then I found this neighborhood, which actually contains a bunch of houses, but has a name that I'd never heard of.  Now, I've lived in San Diego all my life, and I put myself through college by driving a taxi, so I know the local neighborhood names pretty well, and this just didn't seem like a San Diego name.  I checked the San Diego history books I have on hand, as well as a book on San Diego place names.  Nada.  I went to the library, which has a pretty extensive set of local history books.  Zip.

I suggested that the record be deleted, but then I found a real-estate site, city-data.com, that used the name.  Digging into it, I found that they got their names from UrbanMapping.com, a site with copyrighted data.  I looked at their site and found that they had a lot of "neighborhoods" that were really condo developments.  One of them was a name I'd seen on a map of downtown.

That was this condo development and it's marked as a sub-location/neighborhood.  That led me to this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this (and that was just the first few I tried; it's hardly exhaustive), all names on the Urban Mapping site as neighborhoods that also show up in Map Maker as sub-location/neighborhoods.

I'm assuming that Google licensed the neighborhoods from Urban Mapping (or they both got them from the same source) in order to seed the mapping database, but it leads to the question of just what to do with all these bogus names.  My guess is that the names were made up by local real-estate agents (or equivalent) who needed a name to refer to some locality.  Probably most of them were invented within the last five years or so (when my copy of San Diego County Place Names was published) and have no historical weight; probably nobody even within any given area would recognize them.  I would suggest getting rid of them, but before I start deleting them, I'd like to get some feedback from Google as to what they expect of the names.

The real killer is that there's (currently?) a bug that prevents a sub-locality/neighborhood from being converted into anything else.  It would seem obvious to convert the condos, at least, to "condo development" and be done with it, but that's not a permitted change.  (I've submitted feedback on this problem with regards to another location, but there's no feedback from feedback, so one never knows if somebody actually looked at it.)

So I'm open to suggestions.  Where do I go from here?

[Greg Noel]

On Thursday, October 20, 2011 11:06:18 AM UTC-7, I wrote:

... all names on the Urban Mapping site as neighborhoods ...

That's supposed to be, "all condo developments shown on the Urban Mapping site as neighborhoods"

[Nickvet419]

Here are the definitions that the help files provide. 

Locality: A locality is a fairly large portion of a city that has an official name. For example, a locality can consist of several housing colonies/developments. Cities in some parts of the world may not have official localities.

Sub-Locality/Neighborhood: A sub-locality or neighborhood is a smaller section of a city, such as a housing colony or development that has its own official or local name.

Minor Civil Divisions: A district is divided further into minor civil divisions, which are also known as municipalities, communes, among other names. Not all countries have minor civil divisions.

So any of the Named neighborhoods/housing developments, Official or singed, would fall under Sub-locality. So the black horse estates looks like it would fall in that. It dosn't look like that city has "Localities" or very few if it does.   

On a side note,  I had the same 2 reviewers request the same changes from me in Chicago. Some they published some not...  I guess the bigger the area they see fit to publish where the small area like black horse they are not.   Talking with them they seem to think a sub-locality is a neighborhood with houses and stores, not small housing complexes or named housing developments. 

So I have requested help in this matter from my Google Reviewer adviser and started a discussion on the difference of sub-locality and housing development since I am a RER and should know the correct policy on this.  From what I see is that the help files are saying one thing, but the reviewers are saying another.   Ill get back to you when i get a definitive answer or straighten out the reviewers so there is no conflict in policies. 

[momers]

Oh wow!

So I am the local expert in my region on localities and sub-localities and i specialize in hunting down old mohallas aka neighbourhoods which have been forgotten aroudn the city and etc!

Anyway, so with some cred established, i would say, unless these condos actually exist on the ground (are they real names of buildings inside those polygons?), just delete these sub localities.

The conversion from Sub-locality to any other category is a very very old issue, and since localities and sub-localities are used for addressing purposes and are like a very basic data structure, their non-conversion to other categories (which keep changing or disappearing all the time!) might be by design, even though they just throw an error at you when you try to convert!

I am quite curious about the US with regards to locality and sub-locality, I had a question about how NYC and the boroughs are categorized. I also notice that in Manhattan, the neighbourhoods are usually entered as a point and not a polygon with hard boundaries. Strange.

So in summary, i think the US mappers need to come to a consensus amongst themselves, taking into account any official govt./authority definitions and then have a code for tackling such issues and then adding/subtracting from the map where required.

In the absence of any local laws or govt. guidelines, the concept of locality and sub localities is fairly simple for me in the Non-US part of the world i work in!

P.S. I see there is a thread on Housing Developments too, I had some comments and a definition on that in this thread here.

[Nels]

Hi guys!

Let's move this discussion over to the other thread. I have posted an informative article there.

Thanks!

-Nels