Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/Structured lists

This page describes the structured lists used in Wiki Loves Monuments 2011. These lists are necessary to help people find the monuments, to structure the information and make it available through tools.

Overview

Structured lists of monuments will make your lists of cultural heritage look good and consistent . It also makes it possible to read in the data with an automated program (a robot) to put it in the monument database. The structured list system consist of having two templates:

• A header template containing the header of a table
• A row template containing the information of one monument

Implementation

I will take Switzerland as an example. Their system is described at en:Swiss Inventory of Cultural Property of National and Regional Significance. We're going to create or convert tables. For this we need to know the fields to include. Some important fields:

• id - the unique id assigned by the local registry, this is the primary key
• name - name of the object (or a description)
• address - the address of the object
• municipality - the municipality in which the object lies
• lat - the latitude
• lon - the longitude
• image - image of the object

You can of course add more fields and the name of the fields should probably be in the local language.

The fields I used for the Swiss monuments are:

• image
• name
  • address
• municipality
  • CH1903_X (they use a strange lat/lon system in Switzerland)
  • CH1903_Y
  • KGS_nr - this is the unique id

Now we need to make two templates

• A header template which is going to be at the start of each table
• A row template. One row per monument containing all the information.

These templates make the lists look pretty and make it possible for a bot to harvest the information (more about that at Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments/template system).

For Switzerland I created en:Template:SIoCPoNaRS header and en:Template:SIoCPoNaRS row .

Now we got the base of the template system. If you don't have any lists yet you have to get a dataset to start from scratch. If you already have lists you need to convert them. If you're lucky some bot operator is able to convert a lot of the lists automagicly with complicated regular expressions. With the Swiss lists I was able to convert quite a lot with a bot, see for example en:List of cultural property of national significance in Switzerland: Appenzell Ausserrhoden (check the source and history). The remaining items need to be fixed manually, you should mobilize some users to help out.

Now you have structured lists! This is where I stand now with the Swiss project. I will do a follow up most when I got some of the nice tools working so we can actually make use of these structured lists.

This weekend I rewrote my harvester bot to be really flexible. The harvester is a program I use to collect all the information in the structured lists and put it in the database. I added the Netherlands, Flanders and Switzerland. It's really easy to add other countries now. For the more techinal people, the source is available at https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/erfgoed/ . For the people who want something useful, I just hacked up a Google Earth view at http://toolserver.org/~erfgoed/monuments_test/ . This will show the monuments currently in my database in Google Earth.

If you're making structured lists at your Wikipedia, please get in touch. I can help and I will try to add your country right away so that our European monument map can grow.

Steps

• Think about what information fields you want in your table (what information do you have readily available, what can you get, what do you want people to collect)
• Create the header- and row templates.
• Prepare some lists to test
• (if not earlier) contact Multichill