POIs with description and photos

Question

I know this question was already asked, but I have some problems with different API/dump tested:

• open street map: free and with a dump that I can parse and store in my Elasticsearch database, but there is no description nor photos for POIs.
• foursquare: very important number of POIs with descriptions, information and photos. But many photos are just selfies, or very bad photos where we can't see the place. Plus, must call an API for get information with rate limits.

I'm looking for a way to get something similar that we can find on tripomatic. Maybe there is a way for getting POIs on openstreetmap and get description on wikipedia and photos on wikimedia ?

I'm interested if someone have already works on this. Thanks

Answer 1

If you are looking for a solution to create a list of POIs with photos and comments like this one: http://poolhem.se/strand/ (with or without the GPS files) you might find phpoi useful from http://phpoi.sourceforge.net/

Phpoi also supports kml output which can be used to create kml output usable for google maps like https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zK9kgVegGnog.kAFxROaAkU3o&usp=sharing

Answer 2

Several POIs in OSM have a wikipedia or wikidata tag, for example the Frauenkirche in Dresden. Some also have an image tag referring to a Wikimedia Commons / OSM Wiki filename or an external URL, for example the Zwinger in Dresden. But these tags doen't exist for all POIs. Yet you have always the possibility to search the POI's name on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons.

Answer 3

As of a few months ago, there is an RDF database that combines both Wikidata and OpenStreetMap. As part of Wikidata, it also links to images on Commons, and any other related information based on the wikidata tag. You may also look at things like the count of articles in various wikipedias (wikibase:sitelinks) to get an estimate of how popular an article is. Click examples button in the service.