Wikimedia Enterprise announces the release of a dataset joining OSM1 features with their Wikimedia equivalents. That is tens of millions OSM elements linked to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikivoyage. At the core of the linkage is table that maps OpenStreetMap elements (nodes, ways, or relations) to Wikidata QIDs.
The data was compiled by Michal Migurski and is published “as Parquet and GeoParquet files on Hugging Face and Kaggle”. The datasets are under different licenses: Creative Commons CC0 Waiver, the Open Database License (ODbL), or under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
While OSM and Wikimedia were already linked through references (Wikidata items featuring OSM identifiers and OSM features being tagged with Wikipedia and Wikidata links), Wikimedia Enterprise points out that the projects’ data structures are so different that joining them at scale has taken considerable expertise and custom data pipelines.
From the announcement by Wikimedia Enterprise:
Whether a developer is building a hiking app that surfaces the Wikipedia article of the mountain peak a hiker is climbing right now, or a corpus linguistics researcher conducting spatial analysis of place names and their histories, the pre-joined dataset removes the work of building custom data pipelines from scratch.
This dataset unlocks the ability to ask spatial analysis questions backed up by Wikimedia project knowledge and structured Wikidata links: What are the opening hours of all museums in a twenty-mile radius of the geographic center of Berlin? How many churches from the 17th century are close to functioning public cemeteries? Questions that need structured knowledge bases and geospatial data become answerable by connecting Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, and OpenStreetMap.
The post by Wikimedia Enterprise has the technical details.
Footnotes
OpenStreetMap, a collaborative, open-licensed map of the world.↩︎