So, the other day Apple finally got round to releasing the iPhone SDK… While there may still be issues with the licensing and distribution, I’m at least intrigued about the possibilities of location-based searches — using the device’s knowledge of its physical location to search for articles about nearby places.
For kicks, I spent a few hours of my spare time prototyping a location-based Wikipedia search, with the interface optimized for a device like the iPhone.
I’m using a copy of the Wikipedia-World database, which has pulled coordinate data out of articles and linked them up via interwiki links. Results within an approximately ~20-30km range are sorted by distance and optionally filtered by text, then spit out in a list with little thumbnails.
Links are currently to the experimental WAP gateway, which tends to load rather faster over a slow connection and has nice big text. ;)
A small iPhone native app could pull up the device’s location, then pass it off to a web application like this (or present a similar list in native UI).
This does raise some questions to consider…
- What are the privacy implications of getting people’s physical locations in addition to just their IP addresses? Would we have to update our privacy policy? How should we log or aggregate data for debugging and statistics purposes?
- Do Wikimedia’s open-source software policies conflict with the various restrictions on software distribution for locked-down devices like the iPhone?
Update 2008-03-21: While we’re still waiting for Apple to let us into the beta program for official development, some enterprising individual has made an unofficial app for this which should install on jailbroken phones.
Nice — I’ve always wanted a real Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I’m on the go.
Just add an option for a local search independent from the current location. So you can’t know whether the people are on the location they are looking up.
Where’s the api you built this off of? I seem to remember using a location lookup from wikipedia, but I can’t seem to find it any more.
We don’t yet have a standard API for location lookups; I hacked up a proof-of-concept for the demo using a copy of the Wikipedia-World database of geolocation info extracted from articles (link is above).
I’d like to get it added to the general MediaWiki API interface once we’ve got a built-in system for storing the geo info…