URIs
Identifiers in Who’s On First data are guided by two principles.
- The canonical URL for any given Who's On First ID is relative. This might seem counter-intuitive to the point of even being contradictory.
- Given any Who's On First ID it should be possible to generate a (relative) URL for that record using a simple and well-defined formula.
Given a Who's On First ID its (relative) URI can be derived by splitting the
ID in to 3-number chunks representing nested subdirectories, followed by
filename consisting of the ID followed by .geojson.
For example the ID
for Montréal
is 101736545 which
becomes:
101/736/545/101736545.geojson
It is worth noting that because Who's On First supports multiple (or "alternate") geometries for any given record there are specific rules around naming them but we'll save that for later.
By definition this means anything we do (to rewrite or redirect any existing URLs that people are using) should be possible for anyone else hosting their own copy of the data.
And that's the important bit: It should be possible for multiple groups to host their own copy of the Who's On First data while still maintaining stable references to any place in the dataset.
For example, consider two organizations each with their own domains:
The URLs http://foo.com/data/101/736/545/101736545.geojson
and http://bar.com/wof-data/101/736/545/101736545.geojson may be
completely different but both refer to the city of Montréal, or Who's On First
ID 101736545.
Even though each organization hosts their own copy of the Who's On First dataset — and the reasons for doing so are entirely their own business — they still have a simple and unintrusive way to preserve parity when referring to places.
Who's On First's canonical root for Who's On First data is:
We expect that these URLs will become canonical for other people by virtue of our efforts around the project but we've tried to design things in such a way that this doesn't have to be the case for everyone.