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.
Getting Started
- Get an Application ID
- Read the online documentation
- 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:
Find the WOEID of a significant landmark:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(’sydney%20opera%20house’)Rate Limits
Currently, users of the Internet Location Platform are limited to 50k queries per day.
[via http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
