## Thursday, September 1, 2011

### all about geodata and wikipedia; geoHack, geonames (8 million placenames) and geoweb; GIS, digital earth; 1.7 million geo-coordinates entries as input in wikipedia (all languages)

WikiProject Geographical coordinates aims to better organize location information in articles containing a set of numbers that identifies location on and relative to the Earth. In particular, this wikiProject aims to establish a standard for uniform handling of latitude and longitude coordinates as given in various Wikipedia articles, somewhat analogous to how ISBN numbers are handled.
The Wikiproject Geographical coordinates is busy tagging all articles about locations on Earth with their geographic coordinates using the coor family of tags; this gives readers access to maps and aerial photography and allows external sites to create mashups showing Wikipedia articles on maps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates

1.72 million geo-coordinates entries as input in wikipedia (all languages) -july 2011
This is the international co-ordination page for the multilingual usage and analysis of the geographical data collected.Thanks to the free availability of the collected data and thanks to the innumerable helpers who attach geo information to the articles, it is possible to describe the position of locations with the degrees of longitude and latitude in ALL languages by using maps.
It uses the links to geohack (see below) which are in the database in the external link table. Via the interwiki links all language variants are analyzed and recorded in a common database. In order to achieve this, a co-ordination on the used geographical coordinates templates is necessary.
All people with toolserver-account can read and use the database kolossos on server ptolemy.

toolserver.org:
World map with a representation of the concentration of wikipoints:

example of a US laboratory geo-data: http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Geoweb&params=40_8_58.9_N_88_16_22.7_W_&title=U.S.+Army+Construction+Engineering+Research+Laboratory (see how many maps are available in US)
example of a country: see the right column "capital" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France and
http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=France&params=48_51.4_N_2_21.05_E_type:country
You can get many data: available maps, wkipedia layers, photos, Other information

Project Wikipedia-World scan 11 Dumps (ca,cs,de,en,eo,es,fi,fr,nl,pt,ru) and provides:
dynamic Google-Earth layers in 21 languages.
SQL-Data off all scanned coordinates.

Visualization of Wikipedia articles with Google Maps:
Geonames:
www.geonames.org over 800000 Wikipedia articles in 230 languages on Google maps.
The placemarks include short descriptions of the displayed items, extracted from the Wikipedia articles. Webservices for full text search and reverse geocoding of wikipedia articles.
The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over 8 million placenames that are available for download free of charge. http://www.geonames.org/statistics/ (DATA @ august 2011) USA: 2000000 names ; 260 000 China: 260000 names; Germany 180000; France 120000 names; UK 50000names; India: 50000 names...
http://www.geonames.org/statistics/france.html:
37000 administrative boundaries; 5600 hydrographic features; 314 area features (park...); 60000 population features; 34 Railroad Features; 10000 Spot Features (spot, building...); 6000 Hypsographic Features (mountain, hill, rock,... ); 2600 Vegetation Features (forest,heath,...).
http://www.geonames.org/maps/wikipedia.html:
french: 222000entries.
example St-Etienne, France: http://www.geonames.org/maps/bkm14837
You can create account and get a small content management.

Use the JSON services (http://www.geonames.org/export/JSON-webservices.html) if you want to use GeoNames from javascript:
http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html

geonames blog:
http://geonames.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/historical-place-names/
Improving the way GeoNames handles historical names is a popular feature request. GeoNames is now beginning to address this question. There are two new flags in the alternate name edit tool:isHistoric for names of the past that are no longer used.isColloquial for slang and colloquial namesAt the recent Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers is was discussed how GeoNames could be extended to improve support for the timeline. Some attributes under consideration:- fromPeriod (date, year, decade, century or period of usage)- toPeriod- source (book or map where the name is used), publication date of the source- notes
http://geonames.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/geotree-hierarchical-toponym-browser/

http://geotree.geonames.org/
GeoTree is a new hierarchical toponym browser for GeoNames. It allows to drill down the continents and the administrative divisions of a country in an explorer like fashion. To the right of the tree view a map shows the toponym selected. An outstanding component of GeoTree are the flags and coat of arms displayed with most administrative features. The GeoNames balloons are linking to the respective GeoTree representation of the toponym. GeoTree is using the GeoNames hierarchical webservices.

Gisgraphy http://www.gisgraphy.com/ : Importer, geolocalisation and fulltext services for Geonames and Openstreetmap. It's a free and open source framework. Gisgraphy goal is to provide tools to use free GIS Data on the Web via REST webservices . Actually it manage Geonames and OpenStreetMap (42 million entries). it provides an importer to inject the data into a strongly typed Postgres / Postgis database and use them via webservices : worldwide geocoding, worldwide reverse geocoding, fulltext and find nearby. Results can be output in XML, Atom, RSS, JSON, PHP, Ruby, and Python.
example (Paris, one rond-point Champs elysees; in json format) : http://services.gisgraphy.com/street/streetsearch?format=json&lat=48.85340881347656&lng=2.34879994392395&from=1&to=10&name=Champs%20e&mode=contains

GeoHack is a Coordinates search tool.
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/geosearch.py
It's a modified version of map sources from Egil Kvaleberg's gis extension. It is designed to do simple HTML replacements of a template on Wikipedia and serve it to the client. It is used by Wikipedia to provide links to various mapping services, when a user clicks on a link with geographical coordinates.
All parameters (query URL; The D_M_S_N_D_M_S_E, D_M_N_D_M_E, D_N_D_E, or D;D where D is degrees, M is minutes, S is seconds, and NS/EWO are the directions):
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/GeoHack
Replace external links to GeoHack with direct links to a single mapping provider:
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/GeoHack/Replacement_script

The Wikimedia Toolserver is a collaborative platform that provides hosting and support for various software tools written and used by Wikimedia contributors:
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Main_Page
try: http://toolserver.org/~geohack/

---------map sources from Egil Kvaleberg's gis extension
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gis/map_sources
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gis

The gis extension implements the tag, the Map sources and the Neighbors function, in addition to support of other map resources.

WikiMiniAtlas
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiMiniAtlas
WikiMiniAtlas is a Javascript plugin to display a (draggable, zoomable, and clickable) worldmap in geocoded Wikipedia articles. The map contains links to all other geocoded articles in Wikipedia (and can be magnified down to approximate 100m resolution worldwide). While it looks similar to GoogleMaps it is our own software and free data.
WikiMiniAtlas is currently enabled on Wikipedia (by clicking on the globe () beside the coordinates).

Displaying content from toolserver.org to maps.google
The content displayed below and overlaid onto this map is provided by toolserver.org (point of interest and direct link to wikipedia articles). See the following URL:
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colmar_Pocket
Only the english version of this wikipedia article (Colmar pocket) has many geocoordinate data by places.

As for appearing on Google Maps and Google Earth, Google takes a snapshot of Wikipedia every few months and selects data from that.
Only articles using {{coord}} with display=title (or display=inline,title) are extracted.

Export multiple coordinates
Kmlexport tool (http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport): Pages marked with multiple coordinates or categories of articles with coordinates can be exported as KML (for use in Google Earth, for example). This tool and some alternatives can be found on clicking the coordinates or by applying the {{GeoGroupTemplate}} template on a page.
The Kmlexport can be used directly or through Google Maps; see for example Colmar Pocket (see above; save "my maps" and export to KML).

How to add geocodes to articles?
Coordinate data makes an article eventually appear in various services such as Google Maps Wikipedia overlay, Google Earth, and Wikimedia's map service.

Wikipedia project pages of interest:
• Categorization of location, proposal to generate lists of articles about nearby locations from a given Wikipedia article
• Coordinate-referenced map templates, inactive guidline proposal for using coordinate-referenced map templates to generate maps in wikipedia articles
• Geographic references, a list of sources used in the creation of encyclopedia articles on various geographic topics and locations. Finding lat/long info: 7 links; Finding lat/long info in Google Earth;
• Geonotice, location targeted messages using geocoordiates to announce upcoming Wikipedia meetups and local events. A geonotice is a notice similar to a sitenotice, anonnotice or watchlist notice, but it is displayed only to users who are physically located in some subset of the Earth. The purpose of geonotices is to announce events that would be of great interest to people in a specific region, but that would not be interesting to most of our readers. The use of targeted messages allows us to scale our communication better; rather than flooding people with multiple messages or avoiding messages entirely, we can display messages only to the people who are most likely to find them useful.
• How to add geocodes to articles, a short guide to how to add geographic coordinate tags to Wikipedia articles
• How to add geocodes to articles by User:EncMstr, EncMstr's guide on how to enter coordinate data using {{coord}}
• MoS Geographical coordinates, Official style guideline on geographical coordinates
• Mobile access, How to use a mobile phone to search for geotagged Wikipedia articles near your current location
• Obtaining geographic coordinates, listing various ways on how to obtain geographic coordinates for use in an article.
• Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/WPPlaces, Version 1.0 Editorial Team contact results with WikiProject Geographical coordinates
• WikiProject Maps/Source materials, list of free maps for use in creating geographical maps for Wikipedia.

Other
Templates
Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap