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Ralf Hauser edited this page Oct 26, 2019 · 11 revisions

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Water-fountains.org is an open-source project and website where users can find and learn about drinking water fountains in their city. The information displayed is pulled from Open Data sources like OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikipedia to provide information that is complete, rich, and continuously maintained by the community.

Project components

  • proximap is the front-end, a responsive web app written in Angular that includes a map, search functions, and detailed inspection of fountains' properties.
  • datablue is a backend for collecting, merging, and serving fountain data.
  • import2wikidata, is a tool for importing fountain datasets from other websites into Wikidata.

Background story

Back in 2015, I was on the City of Zurich's website when I stumbled across an amazing resource : a PDF file containing addresses for around 800 of the city's drinking water fountains! I was just getting interested in web mapping thanks to the inspiring work at Mapbox, so this was a perfect project to get started. I copied the data from the PDF into a text file, and found a free reverse geocoding tool online that provided approximate geographical coordinates for each water fountain address. This initial dataset was rudimentary and contained many errors, and the city of Zurich has since opened a high-quality dataset of all 1200 fountains.

  • Matthew

See also Trouble-Shooting