By now, you’ve probably read about the advantages of using Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries for your website or enterprise mapping. Still thinking of compiling the data yourself? Here are the worst ways to build your own neighborhood polygon database:

Copy them from someone’s web site

First off, this is illegal. Although many people think nothing of scraping websites (kind of highjacking content), it is absolutely theft. If the original source discovers your theft, you could be responsible for steep fines. You can learn more about copyright protection here and here.
Even if a site allows you to copy their data, how can you trust it? Is it compiled by knowledgeable GIS staff, drawing on unbiased input? Or is it agenda-driven by a specific business or by users trying to get their houses listed in “good” neighborhoods?

Have your staff use Google’s My Maps or similar web polygon drawing

Depending on how you plan to use the results, this could violate Google’s terms of use for Google maps. You’ll need to get a lawyer involved to make sure you are not infringing on the rights of Google (or more likely, their suppliers).
Even if your legal team gets approval from Google to let your staff create a derivative product by drawing polygons and using them to generate revenue for your business, you have to ask yourself how accurate they would be. Will they topologically snap to streets? How do you make sure they don’t overlap? What geometric tests will you conduct to ensure integrity? In other words, how accurate will they be? Also see the next “suggestion”.

Have one guy in your IT department “do the best he can”.

We’re sure your IT guy is super-smart. But does he have GIS training? We’ve seen some results from companies employing this approach, and in addition to all the items mentioned in the previous question (see above), the results often look “cartoonish”. See the pictures below. Figure 1 shows an accurate polygon database from Maponics. Figure 2 shows the simplistic version from another source.

Fig 1. Maponics’ accurate neighborhood polygons

Fig 2. Imprecise polygons from sloppy digitizing

Even if your IT guy has killer GIS skills, and takes his time to do it right, can he really get results fast enough for you to launch? He’ll have to balance speed with accuracy and there are no short cuts. And what will your plan be for maintenance, when users send you feedback on inaccuracies?

Try to find a bunch of free stuff on the web

Actually, you can find 5 or 10 cities of neighborhood boundaries in the public domain. So if you only need a few cities, by all means do your searches and download the shapefiles. But Maponics has confirmed that some of these datasets have topological errors, making them less useful for analytics (like making sure there are no gaps or overlaps). And each city has an inconsistent format, accuracy, and detail level. Reconciling those differences is critical to providing a consistent and satisfactory user experience.

Do it once and figure you’ll never have to update

What are your plans when users complain? Oh, be assured, you’ll get complaints. Remember, there is no perfect definition of neighborhood boundaries, but there are generally accepted definititions. When you build a neighborhood map database yourself for cities you do not know you need to have a rigorous vetting plan or your data will likely have many errors in it.
And over time, neighborhood perceptions change. Are you ready to maintain it? Maponics, as a commercial entity, is committed to regular reviews and maintenance of the polygon dataset.

Offshore it

Foreign labor is certainly cheap. Of course, managing that remote workforce is no simple task and requires expense.
More importantly, neighborhoods require local knowledge and judgments that you can’t outsource. Perhaps you could gather all the resources and ship that off to India. But your resources will certainly be conflicting – who will resolve those differences? QC by locals is critical. If you are going to gather the resources, and manage an offshore relationship, you might as well do it in-house. But then all the other “recommendations” here come into play.

If you want the best neighborhood map data, from a business focused on an unbiased, accurate, and maintainable process, check out Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries.

Already have the beginnings of a neighborhood data set? Maponics Neighborhood Trade-In program will help you capitalize on your efforts.

How NOT to Build Your Own Neighborhood Boundaries

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Fig 1. Maponics’ accurate neighborhood polygons	Fig 2. Imprecise polygons from sloppy digitizing