GeoPython2019

Wikidata - a new source for geospatial data
2019-06-24, 16:30–18:30, Room 1

Wikidata gives us a new way to query the world's knowledge (e.g "give me a map of cities with a female mayor, ordered by size"). This workshop will give an introduction to the project and show how it can be interfaced with Python.


Wikidata is a project by the Wikimedia foundation and the Wikidata community. Its goal is to be a machine readable collection of all human knowledge. Wikidata does this by forming a knowledge graph that can be extended and queried by any user, anywhere. Much of the data that is stored in Wikidata of course has a geographical reference or relates to entities that have a geographical reference. Wikidata can be a powerful helper when building geographical applications. It can be used to query geographical data directly but it can also become especially helpful as a way to enhance existing geodata.

In this workshop, I will introduce the Wikidata project and show examples that have been built with it. It will also show how it can be interfaced with Python both to query data but also to import more data into the project. Furthermore, integration with other existing tools like OpenStreetMap will be shown.