[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




More information about the talk mailing list