[Openstreetmap] Linking in Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> Technically, this would be possible but it would involve parsing a rather
> hairy hierarchy of <div>s on the Wikipedia content. Is anyone aware of any
> plans by Wikipedia to provide entries as a concise XML description rather
> than a full HTML page? I can see that having enormous potential.

The German Wikipedia has been doing with this for biographical 
metadata for persons ("Personendaten"), which is useful for a 
search on birth year, death year, profession, and nationality.  
The German Wikipedia-on-DVD published by a private company has 
such a search function.  I don't know of any concrete plans to use 
a similar system for geographic places, but I guess it could make 
a lot of sense.

You might also want to look at Wikitravel.org where places are 
described from a tourist's perspective.

The German Personendaten approach consists of a wiki template, 
which is manually edited into every article, e.g.:

 {{Personendaten|
   NAME=Churchill, Winston
  |ALTERNATIVNAMEN=Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
  |KURZBESCHREIBUNG=Britischer Premierminister während des Zweiten Weltkriegs
  |GEBURTSDATUM=[[30. November]] [[1874]]
  |GEBURTSORT=[[Blenheim Palace]] bei [[Woodstock]], [[Großbritannien]]
  |STERBEDATUM=[[24. Januar]] [[1965]]
  |STERBEORT=[[London]], [[Großbritannien]]
 }}

Here "Geburtsdatum" means "birthdate", "Sterbeort" means "place of 
death", etc.

This template text (within {{ and }}) can easily be extracted from 
the raw wiki text and processed into a database table.

The English Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin 
contains the geographic coordinates of that city in a template 
format {{coor dm|52|31|N|13|24|E|}} but the corresponding article 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London doesn't.  However, I assume 
you wanted something more than just the geo coordinates, more like 
the German Personendaten approach?

If you can write a description of what you need, I might bring 
this to the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt, two weeks from now.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se