The Boston ArchiveBoston, Massachusetts

Dataset

Fire Districts

Boston Fire Department (BFD) district boundaries per general order of the fire department. New districts went into effect on 8/3/2011. This data was last updated on 9/22/2015 by BFD personnel. Boundaries are coincident with the Street Address Management (SAM) conflated street centerline data.…

Dataset

Publisher
Boston Maps
Spatial coverage
Boston, Massachusetts
Fields
7
Keywords
bfd, boston, bostonmaps, ckan, districts, fire
Publisher's page
https://data.boston.gov/dataset/fire-districts

Artifacts

“Preserved” means the archive holds the bytes and their digest. “Referenced” means it holds the record of them and nothing more. The archive does not claim a holding it cannot prove.

FormatPreservationSizeDigestSource
ArcGIS GeoServices REST APIreferenced——source
CSVpreserved1287e0af9bd85a1bf195f560c78802497aa937cfe49feab0372b19aeda107dd87d76source
GeoJSONpreserved34982316ac011d451e95b443cde1a3f14064a28b2eff3ed2314f90974252e12a08a1c0source
HTMLreferenced——source
KMLpreserved441173c47790c3dd7a35a1e8904e2e1a143c3ba0b9d95339bd246045515236e387ebe7source
SHPreferenced——source

Column dictionary

The publisher's own dictionary, preserved verbatim. The archive does not reword a schema into its own vocabulary — how the publisher named a column is evidence about the publisher.

ColumnTypeDescription
FIREDIST_Itext
DISTRICTtext
CAD_Disttext
Descrtext
Shape_Lengthtext
Shape_Areatext
shape_wkttext

The complete dictionary, exactly as the publisher words it, is served as its own holding at /asset/b2387e48dad4180aa11f85af87b52a1e/fire-districts-columns.json — 796 bytes, SHA-256 b2387e48dad4180a…, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.

Questions this record answers

Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.

Who publishes Fire Districts, and under what license?

Boston Maps publishes it. The archive accessioned it under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public domain), and holds the publisher's own column dictionary verbatim rather than reworded into the archive's vocabulary — how a publisher names a column is evidence about the publisher.

Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.

What does Fire Districts cover?

In space, Boston, Massachusetts.

Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.

How large is Fire Districts?

7 columns, as the publisher's own catalog reports them.

Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.

Can the archive hand back the bytes of Fire Districts?

Yes, for 3 of 6 distributions. Each preserved artifact is served at its own address with the digest recorded at retrieval emitted in an x-archive-sha256 header, and is handed over as an attachment: preserved material is evidence, not content, and is never rendered on this origin.

Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.

What does the archive hold for Fire Districts, and under what license?

The Boston Archive holds this record of Fire Districts from City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public domain). 3 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to City of Boston.

Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.

Identity

Identifier
urn:lemay:boston:dataset:fire-districts
Canonical URL
https://boston.fyi/dataset/fire-districts
As JSON
https://boston.fyi/dataset/fire-districts.json
Version
2 · last changed 13 September 2026

Provenance

Source
City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston) — source of record
License
Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public_domain)
Retrieved
2 September 2026
Source identifier
fire-districts
Attribution
City of Boston
Rights as stated
Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)

Transform ladder

#OperationDescriptionTool
1fetchretrieved the dataset's metadata record from the CKAN package_show endpointarchive-ingest 0.1.0
2normalizemapped the portal's catalog fields onto the archive's Dataset record; the publisher's own wording and column dictionary are preserved verbatimarchive-ingest 0.1.0
3externalize-column-dictionaryThe publisher's 7-column dictionary left the inline page graph and became a preserved holding at /asset/b2387e48dad4180aa11f85af87b52a1e/fire-districts-columns.json, served verbatim with its own digest. The record's stored field schema is unchanged; the graph now addresses it instead of carrying it.archive-ingest 0.1.0