Where 2.0: New Yahoo Tools Add Location to Unstructured Web Data
SAN JOSE, California — A pair of new developer releases from Yahoo aims to add location information to mass of unmapped data on the web.
The first is Placemaker, a new web service that scrapes text on web pages and feeds and extracts location data from them.
Basically, you can feed Placemaker any text or XML-based data — plain text, an HTML web page, an XML file, an RSS feed, an activity stream or a set of Twitter updates. Placemaker will parse that text and code, searching for place names. Placemaker then spits out Where On Earth IDs for each place mentioned (every place on Earth has a unique WOEID), a count of how many times each place was mentioned and where in the text or code it appeared.
The announcement was made by Yahoo’s Tyler Bell at the Where 2.0 Conference taking place here Wednesday and Thursday.
Yahoo also offers this insight on Placemaker’s page at the YDN:
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.
Also announced at Where 2.0 was the company’s GeoPlanet API. GeoPlanet is Yahoo’s open database of millions of placenames in multiple languages, including colloquial nicknames and local slang. So, it knows Mumbai and Bombay are the same place. Likewise with New York City, NY, NYC and “The Big Apple.”
And when Yahoo says “open,” it means it: The whole database is tab-delimited and Creative Commons licensed, so it can be used in all different kinds of applications without any strict licensing requirements or fees.
Other Where 2.0 Coverage:
