Once upon a time there was an awesome maps company called Mapzen https://mapzen.com/. All of their software was open source and all their data sets were licensed under a free license.
Sadly they are shutting down https://mapzen.com/blog/shutdown/.
One of their projects was Who's on First https://www.whosonfirst.org/ which is a gazetteer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer of places. The data is a huge collection https://github.com/whosonfirst-data/whosonfirst-data 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 https://mapzen.com/documentation/places/ (source code https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-www) 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
Hi,
Assuming the precision of those mappings is good, I also think that it would make sense to import them into Wikidata to increase its coverage of geographic identifiers (Q36214810) and authority control ID for places (Q19829908).
What is the current coverage of Who's on First in term of number of places, types of places, and databases linked?
-N.
On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 11:47 AM, David Barratt dbarratt@wikimedia.org wrote:
Once upon a time there was an awesome maps company called Mapzen https://mapzen.com/. All of their software was open source and all their data sets were licensed under a free license.
Sadly they are shutting down https://mapzen.com/blog/shutdown/.
One of their projects was Who's on First https://www.whosonfirst.org/ which is a gazetteer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer of places. The data is a huge collection https://github.com/whosonfirst-data/whosonfirst-data 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 https://mapzen.com/documentation/places/ (source code https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-www) 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
What is the current coverage of Who's on First in term of number of places, types of places, and databases linked?
They claim https://www.whosonfirst.org/ 26 million place records. I haven't cloned the data repository https://github.com/whosonfirst-data/whosonfirst-data to verify (it's huge).
There are 27 place types https://www.whosonfirst.org/docs/placetypes/#placetypes (code https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-placetypes/tree/master/placetypes ).
There is a long list https://www.whosonfirst.org/docs/sources/list/ of sources (code https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-sources/tree/master/sources), but an incomplete list of concordances https://www.whosonfirst.org/docs/concordances/. But as a random example, here are the concordances for Montréal. https://data.whosonfirst.org/101/736/545/101736545.geojson
"wof:concordances":{ "dbp:id":"Montreal", "fb:id":"en.montreal", "fct:id":"03c06bce-8f76-11e1-848f-cfd5bf3ef515", "gn:id":6077243, "gp:id":3534, "loc:id":"n80132975", "nyt:id":"N59179828586486930801", "qs:id":239659, "qs_pg:id":239659, "tgn:id":7013051, "wd:id":"Q340", "wk:page":"Montreal" }
I hope this helps!
On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 2:25 PM, Nicolas Torzec torzecn@oath.com wrote:
Hi,
Assuming the precision of those mappings is good, I also think that it would make sense to import them into Wikidata to increase its coverage of geographic identifiers (Q36214810) and authority control ID for places (Q19829908).
What is the current coverage of Who's on First in term of number of places, types of places, and databases linked?
-N.
On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 11:47 AM, David Barratt dbarratt@wikimedia.org wrote:
Once upon a time there was an awesome maps company called Mapzen https://mapzen.com/. All of their software was open source and all their data sets were licensed under a free license.
Sadly they are shutting down https://mapzen.com/blog/shutdown/.
One of their projects was Who's on First https://www.whosonfirst.org/ which is a gazetteer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer of places. The data is a huge collection https://github.com/whosonfirst-data/whosonfirst-data 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 https://mapzen.com/documentation/places/ (source code https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-www) 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
Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
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 https://mapzen.com/. All of their software was open source and all their data sets were licensed under a free license.
Sadly they are shutting down https://mapzen.com/blog/shutdown/.
One of their projects was Who's on First https://www.whosonfirst.org/ which is a gazetteer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer of places. The data is a huge collection https://github.com/whosonfirst-data/whosonfirst-data 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 https://mapzen.com/documentation/places/ (source code https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-www) 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