Yahoo! Placemaker
Yahoo! Placemaker
Recently Yahoo! launched a new Geo API called Placemaker. I’ve been playing with it all week and am continually delighted with the recall and accuracy it’s able to deliver.
Essentially you can pass in a text string or web document (structured or unstructured) and the service will identify, disambiguate and extract the places contained within. For example this sentence includes the location Sunnyvale, California which whilst seemingly completely out of context is where I work. I ran this paragraph through the API and here’s an extract of what was returned:
<document>
<administrativeScope>
<woeId>2502265</woeId>
<type>Town</type>
<name><![CDATA[Sunnyvale, CA, US]]></name>
<centroid>
<latitude>37.3716</latitude>
<longitude>-122.038</longitude>
</centroid>
</administrativeScope>
…
</document>
Along with the location name, a latitude and longitude of both the centroid and each corner of a bounding box we also have the superb WOEIDs (Where-on-Earth ID). Armed with all this information there’s almost no location based application I can’t build. Indeed sites such as Just Landed which searches Twitter for the text ‘just landed in’ and geocodes the places in order to provide intriguing visualisations just became as simple as tying two APIs together!
As a supporter of all things Semantic, it’s important to highlight that this API goes far beyond some complex string matching. Placemaker recognizes geographic semantic tags, such as the W3C Geo Vocabulary, and microformats such as geo and adr. Pretty neat huh? Drop a note in the comments below and let me know what you think about this and post any links to cool applications it’s allowed you to build.
