However, recently our friends at Mapzen started a project to maintain the outlines and hierarchies of shapes. The project is called Who's on first.

So far we have imported and use country, region, county, locality and neighbourhood shape levels resulting in 233 000 shapes. This is a huge improvement, since we used to operate on 12 000 not so detailed shapes before!

It's important to mention that the resolution of the boundaries has greatly improved, not to talk of the amazing detail in the lower levels of the hierarchy - there are neighbourhoods even in the little town of Malmö!

With that, not only are the shapes freely available for improvement - they are linked together via a belongs-to relationship, saving the spatial lookup in databases for finding the shapes which are below others.

You can see new shapes in their full glory on e.g. the stats page after searching for a place.

Having said that, we have also enhanced the search for shapes to show results on all levels at the same time, so you can easily find the place you're looking for.

Who's On First shapes power our API now, and they can be found in your notifications settings, on the stats page after you find the place you're interested in.

A big thanks to the hard working Mapzen folks! We hope our users will appreciate the improvements!

You can read more about the Who's On First project in Mapzen's blog post.

/peter