On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

Hi,

[ Aude and Christian Consonni, this should especially interest you. ]

I was throwing around ideas with a friend about how OpenStreetMap could be integrated with Wikidata.

The thing that I care the most in any software is internationalization. Having a map in which all labels of towns, streets and everything else is translated to all languages sounds like a super-wonderful thing.

Wikidata allows labeling everything, translating everything, and attaching properties to everything, so it sounds like it could be a good match.

But then the question of "what IS everything" came up. Wikidata was created mostly with Wikipedia in mind, so Wikipedia's notability policies influenced Wikidata. Roughly, Wikidata has items for every thing about which there is, or can be, a Wikipedia article and for things that are useful, or if it "fulfills some structural need".

Towns obviously have or can a Wikipedia article about them, but probably not every street or shop.

At minimum, supporting Wikivoyage is within scope of Wikidata, so imho items for shops would be ok. (at least the ones that would be used in Wikivoyage)

I am not sure about streets... maybe, it depends and is up to the community (what extent we want them) and scalability (technical and community) might be considerations. As well, in Wikidata, we want references.

For the OSM use case, for streets, I think the osm name tags are sufficient. Transliteration of street names definitely makes sense, but maybe can be autogenerated?

In some cases multilingual (e.g. in Brussels), actual translations might be desired, and think osm supports that adequately.

Katie

But do they fulfill a structural need or is it way too much?

If it's way too much, how can this be bridged, or federated, or whatever the current popular word is? I don't even know exactly how does OSM store labels and translations now, but it sounds like another instance of Wikibase, if not Wikidata itself, can be used for it.

I don't have much to add, but I'd love to hear ideas from people who do (again, Aude and Christian Consonni, I'm looking at you :) ).

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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