API to get Wikimedia Commons categories that are near a particular latitude/longitude

Question

I have a coordinate, and I want to know what Commons categories are nearby.

For instance, for 40.7576,-73.9857 I would get Category:Times Square and probably Category:Broadway and a few others nearby.

Is there an API that gives this?

If not, is there a way to get the same via several APIs calls? 50% of false positives is OK.

Note: Once again, my question is about Wikimedia Commons categories.

Answer 1

There is a more direct way to get this from Wikidata, if you want an API. That's the API used by AutoList. Returns JSON or JSONP.

Example query to retrieve all Commons categories within 0.1 kilometer from 40.7576,-73.9857:

• http://wdq.wmflabs.org/api?q=claim[373]%20and%20around[625,40.7576,-73.9857,0.1]&props=373
• Live

Explanation of the request:

• 373 is the property id of the Commons category item
• around takes as arguments: PROPERTY,LATITUDE,LONGITUDE,RADIUS
• 625 is the property id of the coordinate location item
• The &props=373 part can be removed if only identifiers are needed

Response:

{
    "status": {
        "error": "OK",
        "items": 8,
        "querytime": "1333ms",
        "parsed_query": "(CLAIM[373] AND AROUND[625,40.7576,-73.9857,0.1])"
    },
    "items": [11259, 626926, 659652, 827638, 1756846, 1973105, 3062716, 3363532],
    "props": {
        "373": [
            [1973105, "string", "2010 Times Square car bombing attempt"],
            [827638, "string", "Bertelsmann Building"],
            [1756846, "string", "Lyceum Theatre (Broadway)"],
            [3062716, "string", "Minskoff Theatre"],
            [659652, "string", "One Astor Plaza"],
            [3363532, "string", "Paramount Building (New York City)"],
            [11259, "string", "Times Square"],
            [626926, "string", "V-J Day in Times Square (Alfred Eisenstaedt)"]
        ]
    }
}

The server response is rather slow, and seems to increase with the number of categories returned.

See the full documentation.

Answer 2

Wikidata can do it!

Using autolist, run the query claim[373] and around[625,40.7576,-73.9857,50] [link].

This will give you all items with a commons category property (P373) and a location (P625) up to 50km from 40.7576,-73.9857.

At the time of writing, this is 1900 entries. Dropping it to 10km is 1146, and 1km is 141.

(This won't get subcategories of these Commons categories unless they also have properties with geocoordinates, but it's certainly a start.)

To get a list of all commons categories from this set, ask it to generate a PagePile listing, then from the next page select item properties, and then property 373 and 625 when it loads the TABernacle tool. This will give you a nice little downloadable text file with item, commons category, & coordinates. For the 1km set (141 places), this will give you the following results.

Answer 3

You can use WikiData SPARQL service to run it

SELECT ?place ?location ?distance ?placeLabel ?commons WHERE {
  ?place wdt:P373 ?commons.
  SERVICE wikibase:around { 
    ?place wdt:P625 ?location .

    bd:serviceParam wikibase:center "Point(-73.9857 40.7576)"^^geo:wktLiteral .
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:radius "1" . 
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:distance ?distance .
  } 
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
} ORDER BY ?distance LIMIT 100

Run it in query service: https://w.wiki/FQ4

Answer 4

There does not seem to be a Wikipedia API. It looks like geonames.org has some of this functionality though.

For example, take a look at the results of this page: http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_40.7576_-73.9857.html

I took a look at the API requests on that page and it called the following:

http://www.geonames.org/servlet/geonames?&srv=2&lat=40.7576&lng=-73.9857&north=40.762963512194894&east=-73.96087347335816&south=40.752236055031354&west=-74.01052652664185&maxRows=100&type=json&q=&P=1&A=1&V=1&T=1&L=1&R=1&S=1&H=1&U=1

That being said, it looks like this Wikipedia Search with a Bounding Box geonames.org API at http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html#wikipediaBoundingBox is what you would want though you may need to programatically filter out anything not a category.

Hope this helps.