Who’s On FirstThe open gazetteer from Mapzen

whosonfirst.mapzen.com

Nathaniel Vaughn KELSO Chief Cartographer, @mapzen @kelsosCorner

NACIS 2016 // 2016.10.20

Mapzen is building a gazetteer of places. Not quite all the places in the world but a whole lot of them and, we hope, the kinds of places that we mostly share in common.

A gazetteer is a big list of places, each with a stable identifier and some number of descriptive properties about that location.

An interesting way to think about a gazetteer is to consider it as the space where debate about a place is managed but not decided. We call our gazetteer “Who’s On First” (or sometimes “WOF” for short).

Chronology• Natural Earth 2009 • Where On Earth (WOE) 1990s • (WOE) >> Yahoo! GeoPlanet 2005 • Flickr Alphashapes 2008, 2011

• SimpleGeo Betashapes 2012 • Quattroshapes 2013

• Zetashapes 2014 • Who’s On First (WOF) 2015

Sources• Quattroshapes - global national mapping agency

admin polygons + custom neighbourhoods • Zetashapes - USA neighbourhoods • Natural Earth - global selection of zoom 8 features • GeoPlanet - names, hierarchies, and backfilling

missing places • Geonames.org - populations and backfilling missing

places • Wikipedia - names and linked data • SimpleGeo - venues

Placetypes- continent (C) - empire (CO) - country (C) - region (C) - "county" (CO) - "metro area" (CO) - locality (C) - macrohood (O) - neighbourhood (C) - microhood (O) - campus (CO) - building (CO) - address (CO) - venue (C)

Services

• Mapzen Vector Tiles • Mapzen Search • Who’s On First API • Who’s On First Spelunker

Open License

• whosonfirst.mapzen.com • mapzen.com/blog/who-s-on-first/

See also

• CC-BY (with Mapzen’s original work CC0) • Data should become more free over time