May 19
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.
May 16
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:
On the Example page of OpenLayers a lot of differnt maps are shown, where you can get an idea what is possible and how it works.
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
May 13
O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference 2008 starts today. It takes place in California and became one of the most important conference about GeoWeb. All important companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Nokia or Navtech will be there.
The official homepage: http://en.oreilly.com/where2008
Form the year 2007 all sessions are available as videos. I hope also for the actual conference videos o all talks will be available.
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Apr 11
Today Microsoft has updated their Webmapping service Virtual Earth to version 6.1. In this actual version lots of new functions were integrated. Now the service should be working also on Safari and Internet Explorer 8 Beta. New photographies are integrated and the 3D function is improved. Additional useres can generated their own maps and share them with other internet users.
A shot summery of important changes:
- 3D
- More realistic due improved textures and 3d Trees.
- Improved Representation of Las Vegas, NV; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; und Denver. Another 250 cities should follow shortly, hopefully also Vienna.
- Make your own 3D routes with 15 to 30 fps.
- Improved Support of Birds-Eye
- Birds-Eye
- Hybrid-View with Birds-Eye to view street names.
- Platform Browser Support: Support of Safari 3 und IE 8.0.
- Collections: Upload your personal map on Virtual Earth and publish it on Virtual Earth Collections. For this use MapCruncher from MS research, which you can download here. An Example: Crunch sample including Seattle Transit
- New Routing functionality
- Walking-Direction
- Routing considering traffic. Using ClearFlow-Technology to integrate traffic information from traffic.com. Example: SeaTac to UW
- Improved Language Support for Walking-Routes/Routes in 15 Languages including: German, English, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian.
- Geocoding: The new reverse Geocoding-Support enables to convert Longitude and Latitude into an Adress.
- Improved Search: New data from Zagat and Yep included, two sources for restaurants. Example: Reviews of Papa John’s in Redmond
- SDK-Update: New functions for developers with the SDK.
[via winfuture.de]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Apr 02
In the beginning of this year Geonames.org has released a new Service called Geotree. This service structure Country information and other spatial information in a tree view, which can be accessed together with a map. Currently (March 2008) version 1.2 is available, including features like CSV Export, different languages, capitals and random view.
All locations can be visualized using major web based base map services like Map24, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft, Openlayer, Openstreetmaps, etc.
The service can be seen under http://geotree.geonames.org/
License: Open Source GPLv3
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
