Deaf community places
Where culturally Deaf people gather, learn, worship, play and find Deaf-specific services, mapped from open data in more than 25 languages.
What counts
A Deaf community place is somewhere Deaf people meet or are served as Deaf people: schools for the deaf, Deaf clubs and associations, Deaf sport, sign-language teaching and interpreting, places of worship with Deaf congregations, Deaf-run cafes, and Deaf arts and media.
Hearing-loss services such as audiology clinics and hearing-aid shops are a different population. The pipeline finds them and labels them, but they are not counted here.
How it was built
- Extract. DuckDB streams candidate places from the Overture Maps release on S3 straight to a local Parquet file: about 133,000 places whose names or categories could be Deaf-related.
- Classify. Name rules in more than 25 languages and scripts (sourds, Gehörlose, surdos, 聾, 농아, tunarungu, viziwi…) decide membership. Overture's category says what kind of place it is. When the two disagree, the place is flagged for review instead of guessed.
- Corroborate. Places are matched to authoritative lists (Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, the Deaflympics member federations) by website, name and distance. Listed places Overture lacks are added.
- Publish. The result is written as best-practice GeoParquet with geoparquet-io (bbox column, Hilbert ordering, ZSTD), then turned into a zoom-levelled overview file and PMTiles with tylertoo, with no GeoJSON in between.
Every rule change is checked against real place names, including the false positives found along the way. In Arabic, for example, الغدد الصم means "endocrine glands", not "the deaf".
Query it in place
The GeoParquet file is its own backend: readers fetch only the byte ranges they need.
INSTALL spatial; LOAD spatial;
SELECT Ov_Name, Cl_VenueClass, Ov_Locality
FROM 'https://data.leeberryman.com/deaf/deaf_community_places.parquet'
WHERE Ov_CountryIso2 = 'MY'
ORDER BY Cl_VenueClass;