This site lets you explore how the georeferenced articles of the Wikipedia are connected.
1. Look for an article to start with:
Ctrl + click on the map to query for nearby articles or search for an article in the top right text box:
Not only places can be georeferenced, you can try something like David Livingstone or Mike the Tiger.
2. Click on the linked articles to see their connections, or the link in the popup to open the Wikipedia article.
Drag the map to pan, mouse wheel or double click to zoom.
That's pretty much it.
- Chrome users: Sometimes the popups with the Wikipedia link fall over the linked articles circles.
I'm not sure whose fault is it (the app, GeoExt or OpenLayers), but I haven't been able to fix it yet.
- Internet Explorer (tested on version 8) will struggle to render articles with a lot of connections. Firefox and Chrome should behave fine.
- Some articles can fall out of the map if you look for something around the poles (like Bulgarian toponyms in Antarctica)
- The articles were extracted on March 2010. The datasets may not reflect the current location of the articles, or even existing articles.
- Obviously, some articles are wrongly located, they just reflect the coordinates that the original Wikipedia editor entered.
- There are some articles, like Apollo 11 or Olympus Mons that have geographic coordinates, but are obviously not referred to the Earth. The DBpedia datasets provide no means of filtering this 'extraterrestrial' articles.
Adrià Mercader
http://amercader.net |
@amercader |
amercadero at gmail.com
I wrote this app to play around with some of the fantastic datasets that provides DBPedia, specially the "Geographic coordinates" one, that holds the geographic location of more than 380.000 Wikipedia articles. You can find the dataset prepared in various formats on my site:
http://amercader.net/dev/wikipedia
I loaded the articles and their relations in a PostGIS database, and build a geoservice with the MapFish geospatial framework, based on Pylons. On the client side, the viewer is built with GeoExt and OpenLayers, with a base map from OpenStreetMap and imagery from Bing.
I would love to hear your comments and feedback!