OpenStreetMap may be a suitable candidate to populate the location field in Upload Wizard's Describe step, as per this prototype UI.

Tasks

• assess availability of APIs to populate a location auto-complete field
• understand how geo-coordinates can be handled
• get a glimpse of OpenStreetMap's content

Report

• We're looking for a geocoder, which takes free text as input and outputs geo-coordinates
• we can invoke the geocoder on user input in an autocomplete lookup widget like OOUI's LookupElement
• if available mappings between OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Wikidata (WD) items have a fair coverage, we'll directly query Wikidata

Geocoders

Source: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geocoding#Open_source_geocoders

• 🚫 Nominatim - OSM search engine
  • no autocompletion API: https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/api/Search/#free-form-query
  • code base: https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim
• ✅ Photon
  • open source API: https://photon.komoot.io/api/?q=asd&limit=5
  • code base: https://github.com/komoot/photon
• ✅ Pelias
  • commercial API: https://geocode.earth/docs/forward/autocomplete/
  • note for free-software projects: https://github.com/pelias/pelias?tab=readme-ov-file#do-you-offer-a-free-geocoding-api
  • host an instance: https://github.com/pelias/docker/
  • OSM importer: https://github.com/pelias/openstreetmap/
• 🚫 Gisgraphy
  • commercial API: https://www.gisgraphy.com/webservices/geocoding.php
  • last commit 3 years ago: https://github.com/gisgraphy/gisgraphy
• 🚫 Addok
  • only for addresses: https://github.com/addok/addok
• 🚫 Mimirsbrunn
  • last commit 2 years ago: https://github.com/Qwant/mimirsbrunn
  • documentation still suggests that the project is in progress, so perhaps it was left unmaintained
• 🚫 OSMNames
  • gazetteer-based DB, not directly usable: https://github.com/osmnames/osmnames/

OSM-WD mappings

• 12 M OSM relations (12,010,949): https://planet.openstreetmap.org/statistics/data_stats.html
• OSM to WD
  • 3.185 M Wikidata tags: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=wikidata#keys
  • 5.45% OSM relations (654,927), 0.52% nodes: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/wikidata#overview
  • 1-n QID-OSM key, top QID is Q122870674: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/wikidata=Q122870674#overview - https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/wikidata#values
• WD to OSM
  • 402 k (401,956) QIDs with a OSM relation ID - https://query.wikidata.org/#select%20%28count%28%2a%29%20as%20%3Fcount%29%20where%20%7B%0A%20%20%3Fqid%20wdt%3AP402%20%3Fosmid%20.%0A%7D
  • 185 k (185,758 OSM) ways - https://query.wikidata.org/#select%20%28count%28%2a%29%20as%20%3Fcount%29%20where%20%7B%0A%20%20%3Fqid%20wdt%3AP10689%20%3Fosmid%20.%0A%7D
  • 264 k (263,837) OSM nodes - https://query.wikidata.org/#select%20%28count%28%2a%29%20as%20%3Fcount%29%20where%20%7B%0A%20%20%3Fqid%20wdt%3AP11693%20%3Fosmid%20.%0A%7D
• OSM's SPARQL endpoint is gone, so no more query federation with WD: https://sophox.org/sparql

Conclusion

• Wikidata mapping coverage is very low
• Pelias looks like the healthiest and most up-to-date geocoder

Actions

• Try to spin up a Pelias instance with OSM data
• in case of any issue with Pelias, try to spin up a Photon instance