GeoNames NearbyWikipedia API August 21, 2008

There's an extra section at the bottom of my bus stops prototype that shows places near to the requested location, with links to their Wikipedia pages. I'd found this very useful in Locly, and it turns out it's easy to do — given a latitude and longitude — using GeoNames' findNearbyWikipediaJSON web service:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>google.load("jquery", "1");</script>
<ul id="wikipedia"></ul>
<script type="text/javascript">
function geo_response(data){
    var ul = $("#wikipedia");
    for (var i = 0, item; item = data.geonames[i++];)
      ul.append($("<li/>").append($("<a/>").attr("href", "http://" + item.wikipediaUrl).text(item.title).attr("title", item.summary)));
}
var geo = { lat: 51.500789, lng: -0.142264 };
$.getJSON("http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipediaJSON?callback=?", { lat: geo.lat, lng: geo.lng, maxRows: 10, country: "uk", radius: 10 }, geo_response);
</script>

See also: wikinear.com (described in more detail on Simon Willison's blog), which does something very similar using FireEagle.