This summer it was our pleasure to help support one of the OpenStreetMap Google Summer of Code projects.
Specifically our CTO Marc Tobias advised on the Adding Wikidata to Nominatim project that was completed by Tanya Haddad.
The focus of Tanya’s project was to make it easier to integrate wikidata into Nominatim and use these to influence the ranking of results. Previously the importing of Wikipedia data was a poorly documented, manual, ad-hoc process. As a result, new data had not been imported in years.
Besides providing advice and mentorship we also sponsored a development server. One of the challenges of the project was the sheer volume of data, so we were happy to fund a sizeable/fast server to be used for the last few months.
Tanya goes into full detail on all the technical aspects of the project in five posts over on her OSM diary. The post do a great job of explaining the challenges of the project. I encourage you to have a read and follow along with her progress.
Great work, Tanya, congratulations. We were delighted to help in a small way.
Many thanks also to Google for funding Summer of Code, it is a great service that really benefits OpenStreetMap (and many, many other software projects). While we compete against Google in the geocoding space, we’re delighted to cooperate with them here.
Finally we would be remiss to not also thank Sarah Hoffmann for her work in coordinating the project, and the many years of leading the efforts on Nominatim.
If you are looking for an interesting geo programming challenege please get involved in the development of Nominatim.
Happy geocoding,
written in the location referred to by wikidata id Q3297896