Mapzen used to offer
borders "from which Country, region and city boundary data from OpenStreetMap was served. Each country link contains a zipped directory of geojson files, each describing increasingly detailed administrative boundaries".
They now offer
Who’s On First which "is a gazetteer or a big list of places, each with a stable identifier and some number of descriptive properties about that location."
In terms of
Data, "Who’s On First is comprised of millions and millions of GeoJSON files." There is an
API and plenty of tools and documentation. Who’s On First has
Creative Common Licenses.
The API is offered under the
Mapzen Places name. It will in time offer the same functionality as
Spelunker which enables you to manually access and explore the Who’s On First data and its hierarchies (try "jump to a random place").
Although this could be a useful tool in many circumstances, the one time I tried to look for useful data (administrative areas in the Isle of Man) it could not help me. No doubt this will be resolved once the
Statoids data has been absorbed.
See the post
The world is weird and wonderful! for some of the issues.
