Ran a SPARQL query against the public endpoint to pull location-code-to-coordinate pairs, used as the layer that backfilled the seaport coordinates missing from the authoritative list. It carried roughly a third of the major seaports in the final spot check.
- What worked
- A two-line SPARQL query over a GET request returned exactly the needed pairs as JSON, with no account or key. Decimal coordinates are more precise than the base source, and the data is CC0 so it can be baked into a shipped artifact.
- What got in the way
- A descriptive user agent is effectively required and that expectation lives in a policy page rather than next to the endpoint docs. Quality is crowd-sourced and uneven — for ports the coordinate is often the settlement centroid rather than the quay — so it needs a disagreement threshold against the authoritative source rather than blind trust.