GIS 2.0?

What should we call it when we are seeing crowd-sourcing and Creative Commons licensing in geospatial data distribution?

Case in point: the folks at Zillow have released shapefile versions of the neighborhood boundaries that they use in their geo-enabled online real estate service. Why? They say it is "to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database." In fact, they explicitly invite users to add to the collection and post those additions for eventual integration into Zillow's on-line offerings.

Zillow's Drew Myers made the announcement on the Zillow Blog. He noted the large challenge of creating boundaries for more than 7,000 neighborhoods, but made clear that Zillow hopes to gain even more knowledge from this release.

So, after all this work, why are we giving this data away for free? Here at Zillow, we’re all about transparency — we think a freely available and totally transparent nationwide data-set of neighborhoods will result in some great innovation that we’re excited to check out. Real estate is local — and neighborhoods are a great way to look at real estate on a local level. We’re particularly excited to see what companies and individual techies can come up with, who may not have the budget to license this data from other data providers.

The data are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, meaning that users are free to use and share the data, as long as Zillow is credited. And users are free to "remix" the data, provided that they publish it using the same or a compatible license.

Before you get too excited, be aware that the data is limited to major cities and is not available for all states. (why is no city in Delaware sufficiently important?!?) The data for Washington DC, for example, does not extend to the suburban neighborhoods outside of the District lines.

But that's why Zillow has made this release. They want to see this data extend and they are setting it free (with appropriate metadata, I see) to see how it grows.

(Via James Fee GIS Blog)