Cristian Consonni

Creating a Bridge Between OpenSteetMap and Wikipedia: Wikipedia-tags-in-OSM

A Tool to Add Wikipedia Tags in OSM and Coordinates in Wikipedia

Abstract

When you visit a Wikipedia article for a monument or a place (e.g. the Colosseum) you can find a link which will display the same object highlighted on OpenStreetMap: this tool is called WIWOSM and it was created by German mapper and Wikipedian Kolossos. It works using the "Wikipedia" tags, i.e. wikipedia=language:article, added by volunteers in OSM.

This presentation introduces a new tool called Wikipedia-tags-in-OSM (WTOSM): a script producing a set of web pages that makes easier to add the "Wikipedia" tags in OSM using JOSM "remote control" feature, and, at the same time makes easy adding coordinates in Wikipedia articles using the {{Coord}} template and OAuth authentication. This tool has been developed by user Groppo, with a great involvement by the Italian OSM and Wikipedia communities.

In this presentation I will present WTOSM, which is available online at https://bit.ly/wikipedia-tags-in-OSM, and its features and how it can be used also to map places when the only information available is the Wikipedia article abstract, using Nuts4Nuts (presented at SotM13, see https://bit.ly/presentation-Nuts4Nuts-SOTM). This project is realeased as free software (GPLv3) and its source code is available on github.

We believe that this tool can help the OpenStreetMap community to discover new objects to map from Wikipedia pages and also it can create a bridge among the two projects.

About the author

Researcher at the "Digital Commons Lab" unit of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), in Trento (Italy), Wikimedia Italia's vicepresident and Wikipedian,free software activist, physicist and storyteller.