Wikidata Geo-Explorer

Wikidata holds millions of items carrying geographic coordinates — monuments, museums, sculptures, railway stations. Reaching them, however, means writing SPARQL, and for many that barrier is high enough to leave the data untouched.

The task

Open up the collection by location without presupposing a query language — while keeping the route to the query visible rather than hiding it.

The approach

A place is chosen through Wikidata search with autocomplete; the coordinates come from property P625 of the selected entity. Alternatively a click on the map is enough, with the place name filled in by reverse geocoding. The search radius is adjustable between 1 and 50 km and drawn as a dashed circle.

The generated SPARQL query can be inspected and copied before it runs, which quietly turns the tool into a way of learning the Wikidata Query Service. Results appear as markers with label, Q-ID, distance and, where available, the image from P18. Interface, search and reverse geocoding switch at runtime between English, German, French and Chinese.

The outcome

A single HTML file with no build step and no backend. It can be opened locally, dropped onto any web space, or taken as a starting point for adaptation.