Slashgeo

The Google Earth Blog discuss and provide links related to Wikipedia for Google Earth and WikiSearch tool. From the blog: "Apparently someone named Stefan Kuhn processed a database with about 34,000 wikipedia story locations and ranked them according to description file size. KASSPER then created a network link allowing you to view the locations as placemarks in Google Earth. [...] In the same GEC thread, KASSPER also posted a nifty web page tool for searching the Wikipedia database for locations." This topic is very dear to me. Numerous efforts are made towards Geo-enabled Wikis. Here's some links (including traditionnal wikis and geo-enabled wikis): giswiki.de traditionnal wiki and EOGeo FreeGISBook, Tikiwiki+Mapserver , WikiTravel, WorldKit GeoWiki. Keep in mind the OSGeo also has plans regarding this issue as previously discussed on their mailing list.

This unrelated Geobloggers entry lead me to the Geonames.org mapped Wikipedia entries page. See previous stories, including this Geonames.org as data provider story. From the website: "The Geonames database currently contains around 500'000 geolocated Wikipedia entries in 210 languages. A full text search over the georeferenced Wikipedia articles is available in English, German, French, Spanish and Polish. The data is also available as webservice : Wikipedia Webservice " A Slashgeo reader also shared this Google Maps extension for Wikimedia. Oh, and don't forget the great Geonames kml for Google Earth.

The High Earth Orbit blog links to a wikimedia extension to add GeoRSS support in wikis, such as wikipedia. From the official website: "The GeoRSS plugin introduces an easy interface for geotagging MediaWiki articles, and publishes a GeoRSS feed of all mapped articles in the Wiki, for mapping and syndication. The extension has been deployed and is working well, but is in need of some care in packaging and clean up. That's the next step after initial posting here on mediawiki.org. Still, everything is documented below." The Map Room adds a link to the Google Maps Wikimedia extension. See related stories below. Update: 05/04 00:30 GMT by S : Ogle Earth adds the KML Export wikimedia extension to the bunch.

A new version of Semantic Layers (0.2), the OpenLayers-based mapping extension for MediaWiki, has been released, with the following features:

• Google Maps imagery support
• #slmap: parser function now stable
• Quick and easy single-point map generation
• SMW Service links supported
• New Special:MapPoint page
• Smarter defaults
• Other minor improvements
• Minor bug fixes

A friend sent me to the Geo microformat for WGS84 geographical coordinates in the works which should be supported natively by Firefox 3. This is related to the geoURI Scheme and the GeoClue project previously discussed. To understand this Geo microformat, read the wikipedia entry on microformats. From the Geo entry's introduction: "Geo is a microformat used for marking up WGS84 geographical coordinates (latitude;longitude) in (X)HTML. Although termed a "draft" specification, this is a formality, and the format is stable and in use; not least as a sub-set of the published hCalendar and hCard microformat specifications. Use of Geo allows parsing tools (for example other websites, or Firefox's Operator extension) to extract the locations, and display them using some other website or mapping tool, or to load them into a GPS device, index or aggregate them, or convert them into an alternative format. Version 3 of the Firefox browser is expected to include native support for microformats[1], including Geo."

SlashDot is currently having a discussion on the aforementioned topic. At a glance, it seems to be about OpenStreetMap. Here is part of their summary : "Goodchild's paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information." Head on over there to discuss and get the link to the original story.