populated place · official layer
Boston
A populated place entered on the federal register of geographic names as feature 617565 in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. The name is the one the United States Board on Geographic Names has recorded; what the place is called locally is filed separately as an attested claim.
Place
official layer
The official layer: what an authority with the power to draw a boundary has recorded. This record carries NO BOUNDARY — the authority entered a name, and the archive holds that and says so rather than implying an extent nobody drew.
- Filed by this archive as
- locale
- Authority
- United States Board on Geographic Names
- Within
- Boston
- GNIS feature
617565
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.
Where is Boston, and what does the archive hold for it?
Boston is recorded by the United States Board on Geographic Names as a populated place, within Boston. The archive holds NO BOUNDARY for it — only a point. Where a source registers a name and a location and draws no outline, the archive records the point and says so, rather than implying an extent nobody drew.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
Who recorded the name Boston?
United States Board on Geographic Names recorded it, as feature 617565 on the federal register of geographic names. What that authority standardizes is the NAME, not an extent: it drew no boundary, and the archive holds none.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
What is the federal feature identifier for Boston?
GNIS feature 617565, carried in this record's provenance from the USGS Domestic Names file at accession. The archive surfaces it; it does not infer it.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System, domestic feature 617565. USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
What does the wider world call Boston?
It asserts none, deliberately. 3 candidates were considered and not asserted: 617565 (held — not asserted here) — Held, not asserted: 2 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/boston — the archive's principal record for the place, which outranks this one on the kind of place it is; neither record holds a boundary; Boston (held — not asserted here) — Held, not asserted: 3 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/boston — the archive's principal record for the place, which outranks this one on the kind of place it is; neither record holds a boundary; Q100 (held — not asserted here) — Held, not asserted: 3 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/boston — the archive's principal record for the place, which outranks this one on the kind of place it is; neither record holds a boundary. A wrong sameAs is worse than none: under OWL semantics it instructs a consumer to merge two things into one, so the archive asserts an identity only where it can defend it and publishes the refusal where it cannot. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger at /reconciliation.
Attested by: 617565 — USGS GNIS domestic feature id 617565, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0. Boston — schema:about Q100 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipedia, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0. Q100 — wdt:P590 = 617565 on Q100 (Boston), decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Boston, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Boston from USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain (public domain). 4 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to United States Geological Survey.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
Candidates the archive declined
Identities that were considered and not asserted. They are published here rather than merely filed, because a decision nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked. A candidate is DECLINED where the archive weighed it and refused it, and HELD where the archive asserts it nowhere on this record — most often because it is asserted on the archive's principal record for the same place, and asserting it twice would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart. Each row states which, in its own words. A wrong sameAs is worse than none. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger.
- USGS Geographic Names Information System —
617565· held — not asserted hereMatched against: USGS GNIS domestic feature id 617565Why: Held, not asserted: 2 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/boston — the archive's principal record for the place, which outranks this one on the kind of place it is; neither record holds a boundary. This record is tied to it by an internal same_as relation. Asserting the identifier here as well would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart.Method: gnis-feature-id-recorded-at-accession · Decided 3 September 2026 - English Wikipedia —
Boston· held — not asserted hereMatched against: schema:about Q100 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipediaWhy: Held, not asserted: 3 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/boston — the archive's principal record for the place, which outranks this one on the kind of place it is; neither record holds a boundary. This record is tied to it by an internal same_as relation. Asserting the identifier here as well would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart.Method: wikidata-sitelink · Decided 3 September 2026 - Wikidata —
Q100· held — not asserted hereMatched against: wdt:P590 = 617565 on Q100 (Boston)Why: Held, not asserted: 3 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/boston — the archive's principal record for the place, which outranks this one on the kind of place it is; neither record holds a boundary. This record is tied to it by an internal same_as relation. Asserting the identifier here as well would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart.Method: wikidata-p590-exact-identifier-join · Decided 3 September 2026
Related records
- same as — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:boston-2
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/boston-2
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/boston-2.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts — source of record
- License
- United States Government Work — public domain (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 617565
- Attribution
- United States Geological Survey
- Rights as stated
- A work of the United States government; not subject to copyright protection within the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105).
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the Domestic Names file for Massachusetts from the USGS staged-products endpoint | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | decompress | inflated the pipe-delimited names member from the ZIP container | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | filter | selected features in Suffolk County or mapped on a Boston quadrangle, by the federal record's own county and map fields | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | normalize | the federal feature name became the record title unaltered; the decimal coordinates were carried across as a point, not a boundary | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |