Wunderkammer Gotha

A great deal is known about a city’s monuments — the knowledge is simply scattered: an article on Wikipedia, coordinates and construction dates in Wikidata, historical context in FactGrid, photographs on Wikimedia Commons. For a visitor standing in the street, that is three clicks too many.

The task

Bring these sources together into a tour that works as well on a phone on site as it does at a desk — and that the institution can maintain editorially without booking developer time.

The approach

The application offers three interlocking ways in: a Leaflet map showing every location, a list view as an alternative route through the same places, and a detail page per site. There, the Wikipedia summary, selected Wikidata and FactGrid statements, a Commons image gallery and view statistics sit side by side.

So the site never depends on the availability of third-party APIs, a prebuild step fetches external data ahead of time and serves it statically. An admin dashboard governs what appears. The interface is bilingual throughout, with German as the default.

The outcome

The railway station, the orangery, the old theatre, the Bauhaus department store, the market square, the town hall, the historic waterworks, Friedenstein Palace and the ducal museum — roughly two dozen stops that translate open data into a narrated urban space. Development, design and hosting from a single source.