[OSM-talk] Maps and names
Lars Aronsson
lars at aronsson.se
Fri Sep 1 01:51:04 BST 2006
Stefan Kühn has extracted geographic coordinates from articles in
the English and German Wikipedia and published them as lists,
http://www.webkuehn.de/hobbys/wikipedia/geokoordinaten/index_en.htm
Based on that list, another German wikipedian Kolossos has made a
simple map application,
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kolossos/ajax/umkreis.php?lon=0.0&lat=51.50&rang=10&map=1
The CGI parameters are the center latitude and longitude in WGS84
decimal degrees, and rang specifies a range in kilometers.
While the Geonet names server aims to cover the entire globe, the
lists published by Stefan Kühn has the advantage that every name
is backed up by a Wikipedia article. And since the underlying
Wikipedia is GFDL licensed, I guess there won't be any problems
with copyright.
Suppose we could have something similar to Kolossos' map overlaid
on slippy map. Would this be hard to implement in AJAX + API?
Geotagging is still in its infancy on Wikipedia. The entire list
for the English Wikipedia is 1.4 MB. But if we could display
these names on OpenStreetMap, I think we could give users one more
incentive to add coordinates to Wikipedia articles.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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