GeoCommons is a project to show geocoded images from Wikimedia Commons in Google Earth.
The images are plotted as icons so as not to obscure the ground view, and open up on a mouse click. If the heading parameter is provided in the tag, the icon points to the direction of the camera's viewpoint.
LoadGeoCommons.kml in Google Earth and start browsing!The file is only a pointer to the database, so it doesn't have to be reloaded for new data.
If you don't have the Google Earth program yet, a free download is availablehere.(Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS X, Linux)
Alternatively, you canbrowse them on Google Maps, but the thumbnails are smaller and placemarks less accurate.
When the GeoCommons layer is active, the program sends its viewpoint coordinates to GeoCommons on the toolserver whenever the user moves around in Google Earth. GeoCommons finds the images in that view from a spatial R-tree database and returns a compressed response to the Google Earth program. The response currently contains at most 100 points, making sure the "best of Commons" is included. The criteria for choosing the images is currently their featured, quality image and picture of the day status. The database updates follow the toolserver replication lag.
For more information about geocoding in Wikimedia Projects, seeWikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates andCommons:Geocoding.
Note! This project is in no way affiliated with GEOCOMMONS from FortiusOne.