I was checking out the Yelp APIs for an entirely different reason tonight when I noticed they have a neighborhoods API. I don’t know how new this is, but I was under the impression that urbanmapping was the only freely available neighborhoods API (it’s the one I use for geocoded content here on jeffcroft.com). At least for Seattle, Yelp’s neighborhood list doesn’t look as complete (or at least as granular) as urbanmapping’s. It’s missing such common neighborhoods as Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, and Interbay (I would imagine queries against Yelp’s API for Lat/Lng pairs in these ‘hoods just return the larger regions of Queen Anne, Downtown, and Magnolia, respectively). I’ll stick with urbanmapping, but it’s nice to know there’s another choice out there.
http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/neighborhood_api
001 // Jacob Kaplan-Moss // 04.14.2008 // 6:14 AM
Be careful, though — the Yelp API has some pretty harsh stuff in the terms of use. For example:
The no-caching limitation means you need to make a query to the service every single time you want to use it. That, coupled with the 10k calls/day limit, means that the API is essentially useless for anything other than tech demos.
002 // Jeff Croft // 04.14.2008 // 8:57 AM
Good points, Jacob. Thanks!
003 // David Sachs // 04.18.2008 // 11:05 PM
Zillow offers neighborhood shapefiles, which given PostGIS/GeoDjango would allow you to look up neighborhoods using a lat/long.
http://www.zillow.com/labs/NeighborhoodBoundaries.htm
It’s Creative Commons licensed, so more free than what Yelp provides.