Yahoo! has lately opened its own catalogue of geographic information, at a developer preview of its new Internet Location Platform, thus opening up new application opportunities for developers to employ Yahoo data and services in their own applications.
As stated by Yahoo, the 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.”
The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging expert at Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site.
A unique, permanent identifier, called the Where on Earth ID (WOEID), is assigned to various spatial entities. Thanks to this identifier, locations with similar names can be easily disambiguated.
“Yahoo has opened up their geo-database,” Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example is the Sydney Opera House, which has a WOEID of 28717584.
Currently, Yahoo! reports to have recorded about 6 million places categorized hierarchy according to a simple topological model such as country, town and street. This data structure is said to allow developers to query the geographic context of every place represented by a WOEID, and obtain its parents, children, and neighbors.
The offering is part of what Yahoo designates as Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that is designed to help developers build geographic features into the internet.
Although regular attributes have not been yet included in the current beta release, web applications will be able to look up the geolocation ID of several Sports teams like the recent Premiership champion, Manchester United.
With this offering, internet developers can now effortlessly produce web applications based on geographical location such as the successful Panoramio, a geographical-based image search engine bought by Google in 2007. Yahoo!’s own Flickr also makes use of the opened database to return images taken near a given WOEID.
The service fits precisely into the Yahoo Open Strategy plan, under which the company is hoping to make its website a foundation for other applications, either built directly on Yahoo properties or employing services over the network on outside sites.
“According to former Yahoo employee Simon Willison, Yahoo got the geographic data through its 2005 acquisition of Whereonearth.”
“The WOEID program performs functions such as translating a place name from one language to another, looking up the WOEID for a landmark, and supplying a list of likely IDs that match a specific place.”
“It also allows developers look for the “parents” of a particular WOEID. For example, Hearst Castle’s parent is the town of San Simeon, whose parent is San Luis Obispo County, whose parent is California, whose parent is the US.”
The program also helps find neighbors — for example, towns close to other towns or countries in close proximity to other countries. It does not assign WOEIDs down to the level of addresses, however.
Furthermore, social media application developers and internet verticals with a strong geographical module such as the travel industry will just need to apply a little creativity to make use of this database and build more effective and compelling applications.
In recent months we have observed Google Earth KML become the new standard for sharing maps and we look forward to seeing our favorite search engines developing more initiatives in this direction.
More news on this is expected at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, which starts in earnest on Tuesday in California. Yahoo will preview the location platform at the conference, according to the Yahoo Developer Network website. Catt is giving one of those speeches on Wednesday.
Yahoo! has lately accelerated the release frequency of many of its new developments — a powerful way to increase the company value and possibly related to the failed Microsoft approach to take over the Sunnyvale search engine.