De-duplicating Who’s On First venues with vector embeddings

Using four different Who’s On First venue repositories for testing, I have been able to first deprecate about 45,000 duplicate records and then, second, derive over 100,000 concordances with Overture Data place records, 8,000 concordances with All The Places venues and another 500 concordances with ILMS museum records. There are almost certainly still bugs, or at least “gotchas”, but importantly the work so far passes the “better than yesterday” test.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on August 16, 2024 and tagged venues, download, whosonfirst, wof, data, overture and alltheplaces.

Updating the Who’s On First Browser to support Tailscale and Protomaps

The Who’s On First Spelunker is still running, today, but the experience highlighted the importance of having a ready alternative on hand. Something inexpensive and easy-to-maintain which, absent a searchable index, made sure there were still human, machine readable and graphical representations for every Who’s On First ID, with links to their relations, available on the web. That tool was the Who’s On First Browser. This post is about some recent, optional, features we’ve added to that tool: The ability to run it as a Tailscale virtual private service and to use Protomaps for display maps.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on November 14, 2022 and tagged whosonfirst, golang, browser, tailscale, protomaps, sfomuseum and wof.

Who’s On First Browser (v2)

go-whosonfirst-browser is a web application written in the Go programming language for rendering known Who’s On First (WOF) IDs in a number of formats including HTML, SVG, PNG and GeoJSON. It uses Bootstrap for HTML layouts and Leaflet, Tangram.js and Nextzen vector tiles for rendering maps. All of these dependencies are bundled with the tool and served locally. With the exception of the vector tiles (which can be cached) and a configurable data source there are no external dependencies. It is designed to work locally and remotely with a variety of Who’s On First datasources.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on December 20, 2019 and tagged golang, whosonfirst, wof and data.

Upcoming changes to Who’s On First administrative data

There are some pretty substantial changes coming to the way we will publish administrative data in Who’s On First (WOF) and from the perspective of people not actively working on WOF they will be coming fast, like next week.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on May 09, 2019 and tagged whosonfirst, wof and github.

The Why of the How

One of the things I’ve taken to saying in recent years is that sometimes we make mistakes because of circumstance and sometimes we make bad decisions because of reasons… so please just write those reasons down somewhere.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on February 27, 2018 and tagged elasticsearch, go, python, spelunker, whosonfirst and why-of-the-how.

WOF in a Box (part 3)

The Spelunker was rebuilt on a bare Ubuntu 16.04 Linux server, following Dan’s WOF in a Box instructions and everything worked without a hitch. Along the way, I made some updates to the “fetching and indexing data” piece specifically to make things faster and easier for people who just want to work with the data as-is and don’t need to make updates.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on February 20, 2018 and tagged spelunker, sqlite, whosonfirst and wof-in-a-box.

Privatezen

The first week I started at Mapzen, in 2015, I remembering thinking I wonder if I can swap out each one of third-party services used by Privatesquare with an equivalent Mapzen service? The answer, at the time, was “No”. It was a useful reminder of the work we had set out for ourselves.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on February 02, 2018 and tagged electron, mapzen, privacy, privatesquare, sqlite, venues and whosonfirst.

Who’s On First, Chapter Two

It means that while things are not literally “better than yesterday” – since yesterday you didn’t have to read this blog post – it means that things are hopefully better than the yesterday of the last time a service you came to depend on had to shutter its doors.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on January 02, 2018 and tagged whosonfirst.

Who’s On First ꞉fist-bump꞉ OpenStreetMap

The 70s were weird like that in a way that we don’t have time to discuss today except to say that Who’s On First would like to be the bucket of water to OpenStreetMap’s giant eagle.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on October 24, 2017 and tagged osm, sotmus and whosonfirst.

maîtres chez nous

Perhaps we can stop teaching our tools the bad habits of the past.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on October 17, 2017 and tagged nacis and whosonfirst.

The Who’s On First API Explorer

I like to think the WOF API Explorer is another illustration of the idea that “Mapzen should always be Consumer Zero (of Mapzen services)”.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on April 28, 2017 and tagged whosonfirst, electron and api.

The Who’s On First API

Anything you can do by clicking around the Spelunker should be able to be automated using code.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on April 04, 2017 and tagged whosonfirst.

Venues, Postal Codes… and All Those GitHub Repositories

Multiply "a lot of venues, even in the smallest of communities" by the "entire planet" and you’ve got… well, a lot of venues.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on October 07, 2016 and tagged whosonfirst and venues.

Mapping with Bias

I like that idea that there might be an instrument to measure the motion – the velocity – of people’s understanding of place

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on August 15, 2016 and tagged whosonfirst, wof and thisisaaronland.

Missing the Point- GeoIP’s, Points, Polygons, and a Precarious Farm in Kansas

Investigating the consequences of ambiguity in geography has never been so terrifying.

This is a blog post by riordan and thisisaaronland. It was published on April 14, 2016 and tagged whosonfirst.

Yes No Fix

Yes No Fix is not a perfect solution but our hope is that it will at least make things a little better than they were yesterday.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on April 08, 2016 and tagged whosonfirst.

I Am Here

Mapzen should always be Consumer Zero (of Mapzen services).

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on February 19, 2016 and tagged whosonfirst.

Spelunker - Jumping into Who’s On First

If you’re not from New York you may not appreciate just how wrong the current data for the Gowanus Canal is. … This sort of discrepancy is exactly what the spelunker was built to uncover.

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland. It was published on September 28, 2015 and tagged data and whosonfirst.

Who’s On First

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. You might want to get a cup of coffee or maybe a drink if you’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for as long as we have (or maybe longer).

This is a blog post by thisisaaronland and nvkelso. It was published on August 18, 2015 and tagged whosonfirst.