Locations Database

Abstract
It would be nice to have a database where structured information about all locations is stored. This infos could be things like a country's capital, climatic data, number of inhabitants, but even addresses and prices of hotels in a certain city.

We need an easy way to retrieve this infos from each language version in order to display them in the appropriate article about a travel destination. A the other hand, contributors must be able to feed into the DB via a wiki page interface.

The basic concept for a location DB is currently in alpha test state. If no critical bugs occure, it might be used by the productive wikis.

Location database vs. Location article
First of all, a location database never could be a substitute for an article about the location. Database entries are thought to be a help for keeping articles in different language versions up to date and should provide some extra information useful for implementing interesting features for the benefit of all readers.

In contrary to articles, the location database stores the hard facts about locations, e.g. geographical position, typical quick box infos, geographical hierarchy, data about sights, hotels and restaurants as well as climatic data. This data is not intended to be read by wiki readers, but rather by the machine. The big goal is that all this data needed by every language version has to be maintained only once in a central place rather than redundantly in every language version. The location database will be maintained in a collaborative way by all language versions and every language version can take profit of it.

Maybe useful features

 * List of all articles belonging to region XY
 * List all tourist informations 20km around
 * Where is the next vegetarian restaurant?
 * How old is this information about hotel XY?

(more possible features to be listed)

Improvements

 * Alternative input of geo coordinates or a traverse for bigger regions. In case of the last one the center should be calculated, too.
 * In statistics, make difference between articles inserted to primary or secondary locations. Otherwise overestimated number of articles and sizes will be occur. Example: A town like Wernigerode is situated in Harz mountains and Saxony-Anhalt. Both regions ar in Germany. In case of a Germany statistics the location of Wrnigerode is counted twice. Otherwise it should be possible to find also the articles in the sections of secondary regions. -- This should be fixed, now, by simply skipping AltIsIns in the list of sub locations. -- Hansm 12:37, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
 * For quality control, it should be possible to list articles with missing information like coordinates. --Roland 16:06, 8 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Omit LocBD links at the main page


 * and at the redirect pages. I think there is a special database field page_is_redirect with the value of 1 meaning true. --Roland 16:04, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Maintenance interface

 * LocDB Maintenance Framework
 * LocDB Implementing Modules
 * LocDB Module Main
 * LocDB Module Geo
 * LocDB Module Climate
 * LocDB LocTitles

General

 * LocDB About primary and secondary IsIn

Tests and error reports

 * LocDB Alpha 20080922

Code
The release of the Alpha version 20080922 is available on our SVN repository LocationDB. An installation from scratch has not yet been tested, but with some luck, it should run as it is. Both, the maintenance and the application side, need a running MW v1.11.0 installation. A lot of patches need to be applied on the maintenance wiki. The application wikis only need the basic Wikivoyage patches.

See also: Locations Database/Further Development

Very old trials
There had been a proof of concept hack in the time before WV has been launched. Unfortunately, the examples for demo have been lost. What is left is the code for it's implementation. This might be the base for further development. Code on svn:mediawiki/branches/mw-1.11.0-pg/extensions/LocationsDatabase.

Old and mostly outdated stuff:
 * LocDB draft (Request for comments)
 * LocDB Database layout draft

Currency rates

 * http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml
 * http://www.deutsche-bundesbank.de/statistik/statistik_veroeffentlichungen_beiheft5.php