Yahoo’s announcement of its Internet Location Platform will be of interest to web developers and programmers interested in geolocating data. The platform uses something called Where on Earth ID (WOEID), a numerical tag that is associated with a given location; it can be used to obtain geographic coordinates but also spatial relationships (e.g., a city is inside a country, has a postal code, is next to another city).
Yahoo! Internet Location Platform
Welcome to the developer preview of the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform provides a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth. Our purpose in creating the Internet Location Platform is to provide the Yahoo! Geographic Developer Community with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world’s geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner.
The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web.
Fire up a web browser or your favorite scripting language and explore the world
Using the API or Web Service
Overview
In simple terms, the Service allows you to look up the unique identifier - called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID - for almost any named place on the Earth; it also allows you to resolve a WOEID you have received from a third party - such as Fire Eagle™ or Upcoming - to the place it represents.
The API is accessed via HTTP GET; the following examples can be cut-and-paste into a web browser to view the results:
One of the Geoweb highlights of the year, the Where 2.0 conference, is over. But the next event starts today: WhereCamp.
WhereCamp is the unconference for geohackers and WhereCampWiki is where it all goes down. We will be using the wiki as the centralized place for communicating all of the final information about WhereCamp. WhereCamp is like a BarCamp with focus on location and geoweb.
One of the major sponsors of WhereCamp is Google and this year it takes place at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, CA.
To visual geographic content most of the people I know use Google Maps. But must if always e Google Maps? in my opinion NO! Currently there are great alternatives out there, where you can do a lot more than with Google Maps. Interesting projects comming from the open source community. I think the main problem (at least in my country) is that people simple don’t know much about these possibilities, therefore I’d like to provide some links:
A slide deck of the Android Developer Challenge prize recipients is now available. The deck includes descriptions and screenshots of the 46 recipients who consented to sharing their information and is a great way to get a feel for the quality of apps submitted.
The judges, who has selected these applications come from various different companies, which are part of the Open Headset Alliance.
I’ve looked through the slides and it is interesting to see that 27 of 46 applications (~59%) have something to do with location or embed Google Maps. That’s amazing in my opinion.
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
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There are already some videos about Where 2.0 conference online. To view these go to: http://where.blip.tv
One very interesting talk is from Adrian Holovaty, who was talking about: “Everyblock: A Newsfeed for your Block”.
In the end of his presentation he encuraged the audience: “Roll your own maps”. With standard maps like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps you get a lot of stuff but maybe you don’t really need this for your own map application. Additional you have no contol over:
color
fonts
text size
behavior over zoom levels
road widths
languages
of your maps. If you publishing a website you maybe use templates but you want to have full control to design you own cooperative identity. Why do we accept ‘no control’ for our maps? Personalisation become increasingly importance - also for maps. Therefore I thik this will change.
