
Ask HN: Is Geospatial MultiPolygon Data interesting to anyone? - iamjpg
So about a year ago a friend of mine and I succeeded in accumulating Geospatial MultiPolygon data for states, counties, cities, zipcodes, boroughs, and neighborhoods across the US.  After getting the data loaded into a PostGIS enabled Postgres database we both got busy and kind of put our little pet project on the back burner.<p>We're currently revisiting the project and working on finishing up the API.  Yesterday a thought occurred to us that we couldn't answer: Will this data be interesting or useful to anyone other than ourselves?<p>We would love to get the thoughts of the HN crowd figuring that if the data isn't interesting to anyone here it might not be interesting to anyone :)<p>You can see the data in action here:<p>http://geolayr.com<p>Thanks for the feedback!
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epc
What's the source for your ZIP code data? The data for 11201 is very wrong
(11201 is in Brooklyn, geolayr displays it as Governor's Island, Ellis &
Liberty Islands).

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iamjpg
It's Census data - unfortunately from 2001 - we're preparing to upgrade with
the latest data from the 2010 Census which is just now becoming
available...slowly...

Thanks for the feedback on 11201. I anticipate issues like this in the data
set.

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epc
May want to verify how you're parsing the data set, am finding several ZIP
codes which are close, but not quite. For example 12590 is drawn accurately
(as I recall, haven't lived there in a decade), but when I enter 12603 I get
the same map for 12590, when 12603 should be farther north as it's
poughkeepsie. I tried this in two separate browsers so it wasn't a caching
thing unless you're caching by client IP.

Another example: 11202 shouldn't have a map at all, it's reserved for the
central PO in Brooklyn (Cadman Plaza GPO), instead it's being drawn as a
region in North Brooklyn.

Another example from outside Brooklyn: 60515 (Downers Grove, IL) looks
accurate, but 60516 (southern Downers Grove) appears to be drawn using the
60517 (Woodridge, IL) boundaries, and when I punch in 60517 it gets drawn
using the boundaries for 60561 (Darien, IL).

I haven't played with GIS data for several years but remember than there was a
set of ZIP code data sets around 2005 which had accurate latitude/longitude
points but the ZIP codes were frequently off by one (I ended up having to
manually massage the data because I couldn't find a pattern to the way the ZIP
code was appearing in the data).

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tgrass
Very, very interested. Please keep me posted (sent you an email).

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iamjpg
Received your email and will be in touch as soon as the API is finished.

