Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-09-26/Wikipedia applications

More commonly lately, Wikipedia is being used in many different applications, both online and in the real world.

Semapedia
Semapedia is a project to use the physical annotation technology of semacode to link real-world objects and locations with their counterpart articles at Wikipedia.org. Providers can print a "barcode URL" tag at the http://www.semapedia.org/ or http://www.semacode.org/ website and attach the tag to any desired site. A Smartphone user at that site can then 'click' (take a picture and decode the URL) to be directed to the encoded URL -- in this case, a Wikipedia article on that subject.

PlaceOpedia
PlaceOpedia is a project to link Wikipedia's geographical articles to Google Earth maps, allowing visitors to http://www.placeopedia.com/ to add their own connections. The ever-growing database of connections between latitude/longitude coordinates and Wikipedia URLs is available under a Creative Commons license. (A related project, currently in demonstration mode, is http://www.yourhistoryhere.com/, a collection of local information, history, and trivia attached to Google Earth locations.)

Dashboard widget
Sean Billig has written a free Wikipedia Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X v10.4 operating system. In his announcement of the release of Tiger, Apple CEO Steve Jobs used the Wikipedia widget to demonstrate the many uses of Dashboard.

Mobile access
There are several projects to allow mobile access to Wikipedia, including Wapedia, which offers separate versions for phones and PDAs, and JOCA, which allows free access via GPRS.

Link interpretation
Matt Biddulph of the BBC found a way to use Wikipedia and a Yahoo API to build a network of directed links, showing how British government figures are related to each other.