DBpedia Places

About DBpedia Places Android App

Many wikipedia articles contain coordinates. They can be used to pinpoint the topic of an article to a specific place. This app uses Google Maps to show them. In the displayed map area, the app searches for wikipedia articles with matching coordinates and visualizes each article with a marker. On demand, the title, image (if existent) and abstract can be viewed. If possible, the language set in the device is used to get the right texts. All visited articles are saved in a local database, which spares time and reduces traffic if visited again. The search function provides a quick way to find content and position of an article, the history gives an overview of the visited articles.

The name was chosen regarding the data source. The queries are not addressed at Wikipedia, but at a DBpedia (www.dbpedia.org) data interface, which provides efficient search and filtering methods. Right now the used DBpedia version is 2014, accessed by http://dbpedia.org/sparql.

Usage: In general, new markers are being loaded everytime the map view changes. In order to relieve pressure on the DBpedia server, the query is not executed if there are already markers on the current view. You can force a query by pushing an empty spot on the map until the query starts.

If no markers at all are added, it's likely that the DBpedia server is down. Please be patient and try another time.