Urban Mapping Opens up the ‘Hood
Urban Mapping, which reportedly, powers aspects of Google Maps, has announced that it will open its city neighborhoods database to the general public with a new free API. Urban Mapping’s specialty is connecting neighborhood names with geo coordinates to give users the common, local names of areas.
Since most geodata in the U.S. is based on postal codes and Post Office-created subdivisions, which often don’t match with the terms locals actually use, neighborhood names lend mapping services like AskCity[Correction: Ask uses map data from Maponics, not Urban Mapping] a more useable, human face.
Prior to Urban Mapping’s announcement, its collection of neighborhood data was available only to licensed partners. Now that the data is freely available for geodata programmers to play with expect to see more mashups incorporating “locals-only” name data into your maps.
The API itself is fairly simple, with several methods for retrieving neighborhood data (like by zip code or lat/long coordinates). The data returned includes the neighborhood name along with region, state country and more.
The only real downside to the new Urban Mapping API is its decision to use the somewhat more cumbersome SOAP protocol instead of REST, but Urban Mapping has some sample code for both Ruby and PHP developers and there are SOAP libraries available for almost every language.
Urban Mapping’s neighborhood coverage appears to most extensive in North America with 20,000 U.S. neighborhoods and 2,500 in Canada. There’s also partial European coverage with some 3000 neighborhoods, but all of those are only within the 5 countries covered.
[via O’Reilly Radar]
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