For Flickr the answer was the “standard photo response” or: You should always be able to load/build the URL for a photo with a link back to its page on Flickr’s website.

In Mapzen’s case the answer to a similar-minded question might be: You should always be able to view API responses on a map.

For example it should be possible to take anything that comes back from Pelias (or any other API) and simply hand it off to Leaflet as a GeoJSON layer and see something on a map.

With that in mind a “minimal viable properties” dictionary might look like this:

{
  "wof:id": 85922583,
  "wof:name": "San Francisco",
  "wof:fullname": "San Francisco, California US",
  "wof:placetype": "locality",
  "wof:parent_id": 85688637,
  "wof:quality": 9,
  "wof:score": 100
}

A couple things to note about this example:

When we say “properties” we’re talking about the metadata associated with that place rather than its geometry.
The wof:score property and its semantics should be considered a place-holder for some equivalent search ranking to be determined by the Pelias team. Likewise, the wof:quality property and its semantics should also be considered a place-holder for some equivalent quality/confidence ranking to be determined by the Data team.