I completely and entirely support this and would like to be part of the project.

That would push forward the idea of Wikidata as a "spinal gazetteer", a term popularized by Humphrey Southall. I wish there are Mapzen veterans out there who might be interested in joining the effort as well! 

Cheers
Susanna Ånäs

2018-01-23 21:47 GMT+02:00 David Barratt <dbarratt@wikimedia.org>:
Once upon a time there was an awesome maps company called Mapzen. All of their software was open source and all their data sets were licensed under a free license.

Sadly they are shutting down.

One of their projects was Who's on First which is a gazetteer of places. The data is a huge collection of geojson files hosted on github.

The place files include a concordance of ids in other systems... including Wikidata. :)

Mapzen used the data in Wikidata in their Places API (source code) to translate place names.

I'm not sure if we would have any interest in using/importing this data in Wikidata, but I thought I'd make more people aware of an awesome free license data set that needs some help now that Mapzen is going away.

Thanks for everything you do!
David Barratt

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata