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.