Many of us are heading to various places, some familiar some not, for the Thanksgiving holidays. It’s always nice to learn a little more about where we’re headed to. The Wikipedia task found in the Explorer Community Showcase is a great way to do just that, and also another great example of a task mashup. It was written by John Grayson of ESRI’s Applications Prototype Lab.
To use it, start up Explorer, go to the Community Showcase, and look for the Wikipedia task. Just click to add it to Explorer.
Using the task you can point to the map or use an existing result to seed the Wikipedia search location. Adjust the search radius and number of results to suit.
The task makes use of web services available at geonames.org to search for Wikipedia entries that have a spatial context.
In the Explorer section on ArcScripts, Keith Fraley has also posted his own Wikipedia task, along with source code that you can download. Keith provides the source code and a discussion of the task on his Location Based Soup blog. Thanks Keith!
