Game proposal: Country guessing

[Luc Béasse]

Proposal 3: guess country property from geolocation.

Similar to this Autolist

Pave the area of a country with a set of circles. Items with geo coordinates in those circles should have the country property set, if they are locations.

It is not systematic: geo coordinates are set for many kinds of items: events (where they occurred), companies (their HQ), etc.

The question to ask would be "is this a location?".

[Luc Béasse]

Magnus, if you're looking into this idea, Google pointed me to this website : http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm

If you need help paving the countries, reach out to me on my WD talk page (LBE).

I have the feeling you build the DB incrementaly, so I guess starting with a rough set of circles for major countries would be enough

[Magnus Manske]

Hi Luc, I like the interact-with-maps approach, but I don't really see the point of this particular one. Do we actually want the "country" property to be set in all items with coordinates? I thought we'd prefer the "in admin unit" tree, which will eventually lead up to the country. And even if we wanted "country" prop, it would probably be more easy and precise to guess it from nearby other items with the country, using a bot. Say, the closest 3, no more than 50km away, all in the same country; something along those lines. I'd trust that more than people poking their fingers on a mobile phone to cover a country in circles :-)

OTOH, issue #53 is similar, but might yield better results; single, precise location, already pre-selected (by external lookup or objects in the same "admin unit").

[Luc Béasse]

I see your point. Indeed, it is not the most useful property to be set. I actually have a "missing admin unit" version of the query I quoted above in my to do list, but it does not gamify as easily.

Proximity criteria is a good idea, but it's not feasible by bot. First, there are all kinds of exclaves and inclaves. Second, as I wrote above, many items with geo coordinates are not actually locations. And you probably misunderstood my proposal: in my mind, the circles are not set by the game users. They are just used in the backend, to feed the DB of candidate items. So we can be careful in setting them properly.

Now, I do have a proposal along the line of the proximity citeria. Say we have a list of the leaves of the admin units containment tree, which have geo coordinates. We can use that to build a Voronoi paving of the globe. Then any item with geo coordinates but no admin unit falls into one of the voronoi areas, so it is likely to be in one of the admin units which are corners of that area. Now, that's probably quite hard to build. And on the user side, it's a game you'll probably want to restrict to countries you know the admin organization of ... And there you go, that's where having the county set can be useful ;-)

Thanks a lot for everything!