Geonames now includes Wikipedia thumbnail images
Geonames announced a new experimental service that includes thumbnail images of geographical locations in its query results. For example, a search query to lookup London UK will return a thumbnail image of London. All thumbnail images produced by Geonames are acquired from various geographical location pages on Wikipedia.
Marc at Geonames Blog introduces this new feature:
Thumbnail images for wikipedia articles are a new experimental addition to the geonames webservices, the full text search and the maps mashup. Around a third of all articles on geonames have thumbnail images. A simple algorithm determines which image to use as thumbnail if more than one image could be parsed from the original article.
I think this new feature could be useful to many Web mashup applications, especially those that need to display photos of some arbitrary geographical locations — maybe in a semantic-web travel tool.
