Extracting Wikipedia Data to Enrich Spatial Information

Freely available geo data allow a developer to create new types of remarkable services related to the user’s location. Even though current geo data sources have a high coverage and quality, they do not contain all information required by new services. This is because geo data sources usually focus on object geometries and object types. Important information is often missing. As an example: city entries mainly contain the city name and border, but not the name of mayor, amount of taxes, year of foundation, number of districts etc. These data are available in online encyclopediae such as Wikipedia, but there is no obvious approach to relate both sources. Our objective was thus to create an automatic import from Wikipedia articles that describe geo objects and extract all relevant data. To extract processible values we are able to identify property types such dates, money values, powers, heights, sizes etc. This makes it possible to use these data for further computation, e.g. to search for maxima, build averages and sums or to create comparative conditions in queries.