Ble mae Wali? / Where's Wally?
A quick preview of Wali, a side project I've returned to from time to time over the years, but have never set aside the time to develop properly.
It is a self-hosted application for reverse geocoding and finding geographic entities in text, then linking them to Wikidata.
For the longest time, I've wondered how we could add more value to the already rich metadata on People's Collection Wales, particularly by linking geographic coordinates and place names to their corresponding Wikidata entities.
The prototype is a Python app built with FastAPI, spaCy and Ollama. It uses spaCy alongside a Gemma 4 12B model running locally through Ollama to try two different approaches to extracting and resolving place names.
The geographic boundaries and place names come from the ONS Open Geography Portal as GeoJSON, with PostgreSQL/PostGIS handling the spatial lookups for latitude and longitude metadata.
An itch scratched. I'm not yet sure what its long-term value might be, or whether it is worth investing more time in.