Slashgeo

Cartography writes: "A number of countries offer up their official geographic names on the web for use and/or download (e.g. Canada). Geonames has compiled a worldwide database that is searchable and downloadable. Typing in a placename will bring up a Google Map mashup with the location pinpointed - along with all other nearby geographic names." It gives credit to La Cartoteca for the find!

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.

All Points Blog links to Wikimapia.org. From the website: "WikiMapia is a project to describe the whole planet Earth. How to use: Just move the map to find interesting places, click on rectangles. To add an interesting place or object use Add New link. Note: Please only add places interesting to everyone. Who We Are: Wikimapia was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev, inspired by Google maps and Wikipedia. " The site looks very promising however, it is unknown if users will embrace this new tool.

galetrouge writes "I just found out about this MediaWiki Javascript plugin. Based on the MediaWiki page it seems to date back to August of this year. "WikiMiniAtlas is Javascript plugin to display a draggable, zoomable, and clickable worldmap in geocoded Wikipedia articles. The map contains links to all other geocoded articles in Wikipedia and can be magnified down to approximate 100m resolution worldwide. While it looks similar to GoogleMaps it is our own software and free data.". It is embedded inside the coord template, which is mainly used to geotag the wikipedia pages : "Clicking the blue globe activates the WikiMiniAtlas". On the contrary of the google map extension it is not permanent on the page but pops up upon request. Also it looks like they will embed OpenStreetMap.org data soon." I copied below previous stories on geo-plugins for mediawiki, wikipedia and such.

Inkslinger writes " Marc Wick discusses the GeoNames project: how it started, what it uses to keep running, where it is being used and where the project is heading. He also discusses the exciting use of geo-data in mobile applications: "In the mobile space I see the most interesting applications on devices with integrated GPS chip. Reverse geocoding the latitude / longitude provided by the GPS chip will enable applications to assign place names to the current location. I think of a camera that automatically assigns or tags photos with place names and maybe even the names of objects visible on them," he says. Other topics he talks about include how an increasingly GPS-enabled world is driving the need for free data and the politics of data access..." See also many previous GeoNames stories below.

Matt Williamson writes "Semantic Layers, a new mapping extension for MediaWiki, has just had its initial release. Semantic Layers provides a way to easily embed OpenLayers maps in a wiki article, allows wiki contributors to easily add georeferencing data to articles, and enables basic but powerful querying of wiki based geodata. It extends the functionality of Semantic MediaWiki to allow MediaWiki to act as a spatially aware wiki database. Semantic Layers has an available demo wiki, where you can also download the extension and view the documentation." See also very related stories below.

GeoNames has been covered regularly on Slashgeo (see related stories below), but not the GeoNames Webservice Client which just released Java r0.5. The post: " Version 0.5 of the GeoNames Webservice Client for Java has been released today. The release includes support for all four administrative levels, a bug fix for the address reverse geocoder, addition of timezone to Toponyms, enumeration for the feature class, and some minor changes. Java is by far not the only programming language you find GeoNames client libraries for. Some libraries we know about are : * Java : GeoNames Webservice Client * Ruby : GeoNams Ruby API * Perl : Geo-GeoNames * Python : geopy * Python : geoname.py by Zindep * Lisp : cl-geonames * PHP : SOLMETRA Maps"

The Geonames blog informs us 70,000 hotels has been added to the Geonames database. From the entry: "This new hotel data is provided by various hotel booking systems. So far geonames.org is working together with three hotel booking systems : hotels.com, diytravel and laterooms. Data from other providers will follow. [...] The challenge in this task was to integrate and match data from various data providers. Names and addresses of hotels as well as data quality may vary dramatically among providers and it is often difficult to figure out whether two hotels are actually the same hotel or not." Geonames was discussed previously on Slashgeo, see related stories below.

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 discussion on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog lead to the idea of using Geonames.org as a provider of machine readable geotags. One possible application is to use such geotags from Geonames for geocoding photos, which is discussed in Flickr's case by the geobloggers blog. From the former blog: "Now we know how geonames’s URL pattern works. We can map the above URL to flickr’s machine tag syntax. [namespace]:[predicate]=[value] To identify Golden Gate Brdige in geonames using the machine tag syntax, we use the the following string: geonames:feature=5352844" The idea is covered on the official Geonames blog.

Google announced news layers in Google Earth, including a layer of Wikipedia entries. From the official blog: "The new Geographic Web layer we released today is one of those features. We've taken the rich data of Wikipedia, Panoramio, and the Google Earth Community and made a browsable layer in Google Earth. Now you can fly anywhere in the world and see what people have written about it, photographed, or posted."

Ogle Earth discuss the recently launched the Geonomy geotagging-on-webmaps website. From the blog: "Right from the get-go, Geonomy sports over 400,000 georeferenced locations — wikipedia articles, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency data, user-added content, geographic features — all of it searchable, viewable in Google Maps, and browsable by category and tag. [...] That makes Geonomy more like Wikimapia and Geonames.org than Tagzania."

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog describes why GeoNames.org is his favorite geo-data provider. The short entry worth the read and underlines many great features of GeoNames: "It features about 2.2 million records of geographical information. [...] Many reasons why Geonames.org is interesting: First, it provides a unified representation of geographical data from different providers. [...] Second, it provides web service API for querying geographical information. [...] Third, Geonames web service supports both JSON and XML output." We introduced GeoNames a few months ago.