Wikimaps February 2015

wikimaps@lists.wikimedia.org

4 participants
2 discussions

Bounding boxes for countries, states, counties, cities etc?
by James Heald 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

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.

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Thoughts on IIIF ? (International Image Interoperability Framework) -- for maps & Wiki ?
by James Heald 14 Feb '15

14 Feb '15

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.

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Wikimaps February 2015