Semapedia is a non-profit, community-driven project that connects physical places and physical objects with virtual information from the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, bringing the right information from the Internet to the relevant place in physical space.

Since everyone is invited to create such connections we address people who know about places and objects and motivate them to “hyperlink their world”—thus sharing this knowledge and making it possible for others to access information that matters where it matters in an intuitive and easyto-provide and easy-to-consume manner.

How it works

“By entering a Wikipedia URL in the window on the homepage of the site or using a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, a two-dimensional barcode can be generated reminiscent of the one used for security reasons on the online tickets issued by the German Federal Railway. The net address is encoded using a ISO/IEC16022-based Datamatrix-Standard. The resulting black-and-white tag can be printed, laminated or glued in some other way onto a hard surface and then attached to the physical object described by the Wikipedia article. To date, the selected objects have primarily been buildings or places of interest to tourists. However, branch offices of companies and business may also use this system to link their buildings to this collection of knowledge which is being compiled in a community effort.” (translated from: www.heise.de)