CS Forum: Tassos Noulas, NYU "Wiki-Atlas: Rendering Wikipedia Content through Cartographic and Mobile Mediums"

Wiki-Atlas: Rendering Wikipedia Content through Cartographic and Mobile Mediums

Tassos Noulas
NYU

Abstract:

Wiki Atlas, is a web platform that enables the exploration of Wikipedia content in a manner that explicitly links geography and knowledge. To explore content, users can click and interact with three dimensional polygon structures, each corresponding to a wikipedia article embedded in geographic space.  Using Mapbox as the primary cartography platform for development, the Atlas offers global coverage with users being able to explore geo-tagged Wikipedia content wherever it is present around the world. Our first prototype of the altas features almost 1.2 million articles of the English Wikipedia, as well as five other popular languages and expanding. We aspire it evolves to a tool that will help educators and students alike to systematically acquire knowledge through a fun and interactive medium. Furthermore, we will describe the development a mobile application version of Wiki-Atlas that uses deep learning and crowdsourced imagery to recognise sites of interest and project relevant information to a user that navigates the city. We will discuss the challenges of developing an AI system that operates in the wild and how it can pave the way to new forms of urban exploration, opening novel channels of interactivity between residents, travellers and cities.