NACIS 2016 Presentation Martin Gamache, Art of the Mappable Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Mapzen Who's on First is an open source gazeteer. Administrative level 2 and localities boundaries for countries outside North America and Europe where largely missing from this gazeteer. We have been collaborating on a project to populate or create these from open sources when available or secondary sources when necessary for most of the world. We have built polygons from point sources, scoured the internet for national mapping agency data, and compiled boundaries for dozens of countries around the world, helping create a true open source dataset that can be used for any purpose.

1. Who’s On First
The open gazetteer from Mapzen
whosonfirst.mapzen.com
Nathaniel Vaughn KELSO
Chief Cartographer, @mapzen
@kelsosCorner
NACIS 2016 // 2016.10.20

2. 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).

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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)

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

7. 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