656Data vs API

2008-01-18T19:36:50Z

Brady Forrest nearly equates Zillow's free (as in speech) neighborhood boundary data with Urban Mapping's free (as in beer, while supplies last, domestic only -- hey, no sharing) neighborhood ID API. I'm not calling on anybody to give away their proprietary data, just pointing out that, in fact, these things are only equivalent if you have no other application than answering simple questions like: "what neighborhoods contain (long, lat)?" There are many interesting questions that you can only ask with the boundary data itself, or only by hammering the Urban Mapping services Monte Carlo style.

Comments

1Re: Data vs API

josh l, 2008-01-18T20:23:49Z

Actually, 'syncing' the boundaries as Brady mentions in his post, or trying to analyze the underlying geographic boundaries via monte-carlo (or other methods) isn't legal for anyone to attempt, other than the Urban Mapping folks. Their TOS says, amongst other things, that "Subscribers are expressly forbidden from reverse engineering any code or software licensed hereby or otherwise determining geographic coordinates via this service" So, looks like I'll be using Zillow.

2Re: Data vs API

Sean, 2008-01-18T20:32:03Z

Right. To clarify: I'm not advocating abuse of their service or terms.

3Re: Data vs API

Darrin Clement, 2008-01-22T21:13:15Z

While Zillow is allowing people to use their data at no charge, it's not really free either. "Free" would mean you own it, but they are careful in their statement that you can use it but if you update (correct) it, then you have to share your work. Or am I misunderstanding something? Still a good deal, but their data quality doesn't come even close to being as good as Urban Mapping's or other commercial providers'. I guess that's why they want other people to update it for them?

4Re: Data vs API

Sean, 2008-01-22T21:26:18Z

Darrin, I only disagree with you when you say freedom == ownership. They are 2 different things. By license, the Zillow data is as free as Java, Linux, or MySQL (free as in freedom of speech). Zillow will almost certainly work to maintain ownership of the data in the copyright sense. If they own it all, they are free to relicense it (including updates) anyway they want, whereas the community can only distribute it under the original share-alike license. See http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/137/ for more about unlocking share-alike licenses (the GPL in particular).

5Re: Data vs API

Darrin Clement, 2008-01-23T00:16:15Z

Thanks - just for the record, I was only commenting on the literal word "free" not the conceptual extension to "freedom". No doubt, free and freedom are not equal.

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