Announcing Yahoo Placemaker - Geo-enrich Your Content

http://www.ygeoblog.com/2009/05/yahoo-placemaker/

by Brentley_11 • 17 years ago

23 12 17 years ago

ygeoblog.com

aditya2• 17 years ago

It's gone? 404 and no google cache!

Here's some other info though: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/05/20/yahoo-releases-pl...

mshafrir• 17 years ago

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/

Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.

Placemaker provides geo-enrichment for the hugely significant proportion of Web content that is geographically relevant but not geographically discoverable. Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found. The WOEIDs returned by the service can be passed to Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet™ API for further geographic enrichment and discovery.

Placemaker is not a geocoder and does not perform street-level address recognition; it is however a geo-extraction and indexing tool designed to help determine the 'whereness' of a document or atomic unit of text. It provides the geographic developer community with the means to mark-up and index their content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner, and assists with geographic discovery and aggregation across the Internet.

apalopuss2• 17 years ago

What's the advantage over a simple GEO microformat? http://microformats.org/wiki/geo

aditya2• 17 years ago

You as a publisher or a consumer don't have to actually DO anything, you give it a chunk of text and it figures out what place you're talking about.

(This is awesome.)

apalopuss2• 17 years ago

Thank you for the clarification: this is a lot different from explicitely specify GEO coordinates...

calambrac• 17 years ago

Um, what? This parses geoinformation from data. If your data has microformatted geoinformation, it will probably find that, too.

dxjones• 17 years ago

But if your "geo information" comes from a random web browsing person who lives in "Sunnyvale, CA", this service can tell you the long/lat ...

It is the "unstructured" plain text input that people will appreciate about this service.

jonknee• 17 years ago

This is really great, parsing out locations isn't the easiest problem to roll yourself. This should open up a lot of interesting mashups.

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

I checked this out, and it reminded me of a pet peeve of mine with APIs.

I know this is hacker news and all, but it's annoying when a neat-looking new api is released like this and the documentation doesn't have any obvious cut-and-paste examples of Get calls to play around with. They offer up two examples, but the "examples" don't resemble anything that I can play with or take action with, I see two code snippets and not much in the way of explanation.

I find enough APIs like this that I have a text file with sample api calls for different services that I get out when I go to play around with them as I can't find cut-and-paste examples of their calls in their documentation.

If anyone can steer me to a URL I can try out (I have an api key), I'd be appreciative. It's just not clear to me, as a somewhat novice developer how to use this service without a blunt example.

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

I cooked up something for YQL so you can try it in the YQL console: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20*%20from%...

Use either documentContent or documentURL to specify what you want to use. I quite enjoyed trying War and Peace (from Gutenberg) although the whole book is a bit big for a single request.

Also this my personal API key. So please don't be jerks with it. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I work for Y!

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

I wasn't able to find any viewport biasing, that would be very useful for disambiguation. For example, "Im in the Mission right now" is pretty vague unless I could viewport bias the analysis to 37/-122. Google Geo API offers this, but last time I tried it it didn't work very well.

I was impressed by this api from Yahoo a lot. It worked really well. I'd already written my own but this works super fast and reliably. I just need more control over disambiguation.

ngrandy• 17 years ago

this is very cool, and the beginning of a trend, it seems to me. the whole semantic web depends on structured information, but it's a pain to structure information. it makes a lot of sense that the services to structure plain text will be made available as APIs - eg to extract geo information, date and time information, contact information, etc.

Announcing Yahoo Placemaker - Geo-enrich Your Content

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