neighborhood · official boundary
Harbor Islands
An official neighborhood of Boston, as bounded by the Boston Planning Department — 825 acres. This is the official layer: the boundary an authority drew. What people call this place, and where they say it reaches, are filed separately as attested claims.
The official boundary of Harbor Islands as promulgated by the Boston Planning Department.
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
- neighborhood
- Authority
- Boston Planning Department
- Within
- Boston
- Area
- 3.34 square kilometers
- Boundary
- held as GeoJSON at
/asset/50aad826eb339b8b233ce54ced04521b/harbor-islands.geojson— 58709 bytes, exactly as accessioned
Map
image/svg+xml at /asset/aa86b14423ed44e377cfd245b1c63b57/harbor-islands.svg — 6890 bytes, SHA-256 aa86b14423ed44e3… · Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0The exact coordinates are held separately as
/asset/50aad826eb339b8b233ce54ced04521b/harbor-islands.geojson (application/geo+json, 58709 bytes, SHA-256 50aad826eb339b8b…). 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 Harbor Islands, and what kind of boundary does the archive hold?
Harbor Islands is recorded as a neighborhood, within Boston. The archive holds its boundary on the official layer: promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
Who drew the boundary of Harbor Islands?
Boston Planning Department 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: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
How large is Harbor Islands?
3.34 square kilometers, computed from the boundary the archive holds and not quoted from elsewhere.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
What does the archive's map of Harbor Islands 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/aa86b14423ed44e377cfd245b1c63b57/harbor-islands.svg. The exact coordinates it was drawn from are served separately as application/geo+json at /asset/50aad826eb339b8b233ce54ced04521b/harbor-islands.geojson.
Attested by: Rendered by archive-ingest 0.1.0 from the boundary this archive holds; digest aa86b14423ed44e377cfd245b1c63b57857a21ffd7283845e54eb040ee4f8344.
What does the wider world call Harbor Islands?
It asserts none, deliberately. 2 candidates were considered and not asserted: Q34678980 (declined) — Q34678980 answers to this record's name but is classed as island — a different kind of thing from the municipal neighborhood this record holds; Q894563 (declined) — Q894563 answers to this record's name but is classed as National Recreation Area, National Park System unit — a different kind of thing from the municipal neighborhood this record holds. 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: Q34678980 — Q34678980 — label "Harbor Islands", classed as island, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0. Q894563 — Q894563 — label "Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area", classed as National Recreation Area, National Park System unit, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Harbor Islands, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Harbor Islands from Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, 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 Boston Planning Department.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, 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.
- Wikidata —
Q34678980· declinedMatched against: Q34678980 — label "Harbor Islands", classed as islandWhy: Q34678980 answers to this record's name but is classed as island — a different kind of thing from the municipal neighborhood this record holds. Asserting sameAs between them would flatten two entities the archive keeps apart on principle.Method: named-refusal · Decided 3 September 2026 - Wikidata —
Q894563· declinedMatched against: Q894563 — label "Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area", classed as National Recreation Area, National Park System unitWhy: Q894563 answers to this record's name but is classed as National Recreation Area, National Park System unit — a different kind of thing from the municipal neighborhood this record holds. Asserting sameAs between them would flatten two entities the archive keeps apart on principle.Method: named-refusal · Decided 3 September 2026
Related records
- located in — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:harbor-islands
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/harbor-islands
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/harbor-islands.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries — source of record
- License
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 22
- Attribution
- Boston Planning Department
- Rights as stated
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the official neighborhood boundaries as GeoJSON from the City of Boston open-data portal | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | reproject | the source is already WGS 84 (EPSG:4326); the geometry was set to that SRID and multi-cast without alteration of coordinates | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | normalize | the feature's name became the record title; the boundary was written to the official layer with the promulgating authority named | 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/50aad826eb339b8b233ce54ced04521b/harbor-islands.geojson and a static map rendered server-side at /asset/aa86b14423ed44e377cfd245b1c63b57/harbor-islands.svg. The stored geometry is unchanged; the record graph now addresses it instead of carrying it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |