district · official boundary
Chinatown
A Main Streets commercial district as bounded by the City of Boston.
Place
official layer
An official boundary, promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it. It is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer.
- Filed by this archive as
- district
- Authority
- City of Boston Main Streets
- Within
- Boston
- Area
- 4.99 hectares
- Boundary
- held as GeoJSON at
/asset/95ee0d9b03ee8c1e82f9c2b1a77e0fb3/chinatown-2.geojson— 2299 bytes, exactly as accessioned
Map
image/svg+xml at /asset/e87006bfed4c29b60b05c1990a33227c/chinatown-2.svg — 1713 bytes, SHA-256 e87006bfed4c29b6… · Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0The exact coordinates are held separately as
/asset/95ee0d9b03ee8c1e82f9c2b1a77e0fb3/chinatown-2.geojson (application/geo+json, 2299 bytes, SHA-256 95ee0d9b03ee8c1e…). The map is simplified for drawing; the boundary is not.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 Chinatown, and what kind of boundary does the archive hold?
Chinatown is recorded as a district, within Boston. The archive holds its boundary on the official layer: promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it.
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.
Who drew the boundary of Chinatown?
City of Boston Main Streets promulgated it. A boundary with no promulgating authority is an assertion rather than a fact, and this archive files those separately, as claims.
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 Chinatown?
4.99 hectares, computed from the boundary the archive holds and not quoted from elsewhere.
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's map of Chinatown show?
A static map of the boundary, rendered by the archive on a server and never in a reader's browser, served as image/svg+xml at /asset/e87006bfed4c29b60b05c1990a33227c/chinatown-2.svg. The exact coordinates it was drawn from are served separately as application/geo+json at /asset/95ee0d9b03ee8c1e82f9c2b1a77e0fb3/chinatown-2.geojson.
Attested by: Rendered by archive-ingest 0.1.0 from the boundary this archive holds; digest e87006bfed4c29b60b05c1990a33227cfeeb700925637b2ef6f6668573e26875.
What does the wider world call Chinatown?
It asserts none, deliberately. 2 candidates were considered and not asserted: Chinatown,_Boston (declined) — Rejected by adjudication (POL-2): this record is the City of Boston's Chinatown Main Streets district, and /place/chinatown is the Chinatown neighborhood; Q1009855 (declined) — Rejected by adjudication (POL-2): this record is the City of Boston's Chinatown Main Streets district, and /place/chinatown is the Chinatown neighborhood. 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: Chinatown,_Boston — schema:about Q1009855 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipedia, decided 13 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0. Q1009855 — Q1009855 — label "Chinatown", classed as Chinatown, neighborhood in Boston, decided 13 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Chinatown, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Chinatown 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). 4 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.
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.
- English Wikipedia —
Chinatown,_Boston· declinedMatched against: schema:about Q1009855 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipediaWhy: Rejected by adjudication (POL-2): this record is the City of Boston's Chinatown Main Streets district, and /place/chinatown is the Chinatown neighborhood. The district's boundary encloses 49,937 square meters, 99.98% of it inside the neighborhood's 308,874 square meters, and the two overlap at IoU 0.1616, far below the 0.95 at which the archive holds two boundaries to be one place. The identifier names the neighborhood, and is asserted on /place/chinatown.Method: wikidata-sitelink · Decided 13 September 2026 - Wikidata —
Q1009855· declinedMatched against: Q1009855 — label "Chinatown", classed as Chinatown, neighborhood in BostonWhy: Rejected by adjudication (POL-2): this record is the City of Boston's Chinatown Main Streets district, and /place/chinatown is the Chinatown neighborhood. The district's boundary encloses 49,937 square meters, 99.98% of it inside the neighborhood's 308,874 square meters, and the two overlap at IoU 0.1616, far below the 0.95 at which the archive holds two boundaries to be one place. The identifier names the neighborhood, and is asserted on /place/chinatown.Method: label-type-geography (proximity) · Decided 13 September 2026
Related records
- located in — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:chinatown-2
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/chinatown-2
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/chinatown-2.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
- 4
- Attribution
- City of Boston
- Rights as stated
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the dataset's GeoJSON from the City of Boston open-data portal | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | normalize | the source's own name field became the record title; no name was supplied by the archive | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | reproject | the source is WGS 84 (EPSG:4326); geometry was set to that SRID without alteration of coordinates | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | externalize-boundary | The boundary left the inline page graph and became two preserved holdings: the exact coordinates at /asset/95ee0d9b03ee8c1e82f9c2b1a77e0fb3/chinatown-2.geojson and a static map rendered server-side at /asset/e87006bfed4c29b60b05c1990a33227c/chinatown-2.svg. The stored geometry is unchanged; the record graph now addresses it instead of carrying it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |