Developers looking for new ways to mashup data on a neighborhood level (two of my current favorite applications are Walk Score and Drive Score) have a couple new options this week.
First, Urban Mapping released its free Neighborhood boundary API and now Zillow has followed suit, releasing over 7000 individual boundary files.
What’s in it for Zillow? Well, it’s a perfect example of crowdsourcing their development. Zillow hopes the folks that use the definitions can in turn refine them and then pitch them back into the mix.
From ZillowBlog:
We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.
Makes perfect sense – especially since their neighborhood definitions (at least where I live) are not exactly perfect (see Zillow Launches New Smart Search Feature).
Nevertheless, kudos to both for releasing this kind of valuable geo-data to the wild. It’s way above my head, but I’m sure someone out there will have some ideas on how to use it.
