Hi there,
Does anyone know a good data-source of bounding information for
countries, states, counties, cities, etc?
Ideally, this information might be on Wikidata,
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1332 Co-ordinates of
northernmost post
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1333 Co-ordinates of
southernmost post
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1334 Co-ordinates of
easternmost post
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1335 Co-ordinates of
westernmost post
-- but there's very little there yet.
I'm asking because the big 50,000 map georeferencing of the British
Library "Mechanical Curator" maps should be going live in the next two
to three weeks.
A project target would be to get a back-end in place that can upload
maps to Commons *with appropriate categories* within 24 hours of an
image being georeferenced by a volunteer.
A batch of 3000 maps already geo-referenced is available as a test set.
I have had some success using Nominatim on the centre point plus points
40% of the way to each corner, to identify continents, countries, states
and counties that the map appears to be contained within.
But it would be good to know whether it is a map of a whole county, or a
map of several counties, or a map of a large feature within a county.
At the moment, my Nominatim script is a bit cautious, especially for
areas surrounded by sea -- eg Cornwall, Devon, Italy. It's not so good
at recognising that the map is a bit smaller than the encompassing
continent/country/region/county. It would be good to be able to compare
the bounding boxes, to determine how much of the county is in the map,
and vice-versa.
Does anyone know if such data is readily obtainable? Or if there are
good online services from which it could be got on the fly?
Cheers,
James.
Hi,
I'm increasingly seeing IIIF (International Image Interoperability
Framework) as a standard for serving images from repositories,
tileservers, etc -- especially for maps.
(eg Klokan offer an IIIF hosting service, and use it as part of the
stack for their Georeferencer; National Library of Wales for their map
projects, etc.)
Are people aware of IIIF ?
Does it have advantages ?
In the medium term, would aiming for an IIIF-compatible interface to the
proposed Wikimaps tileserver, or even main Commons itself, make any sense ?
With the Structured Data initiative for Commons now in the works, does
it make sense to make sure that there are properties baked in for
everything that would be needed to support IIIF? Also, to provide for
any functionality that could potentially be exposed through IIIF?
I see that there are going to be quite a lot of Wikidata people at the
Europeana Tech meeting in Paris on Thursday and Friday this week; and
also several presentations that will touch on IIIF.
Is it worth trying to put together a heads-up for Wikidata people coming
to this cold, as a background briefing on IIIF, and why these
talks/posters might be interesting to them?
As people with much more map experience than me, can I therefore ask
people on this list what they think of IIIF, and whether it is worth
getting on to our radar?
Thanks,
James.