

Announcing Yahoo Placemaker - Geo-enrich Your Content - Brentley_11
http://www.ygeoblog.com/2009/05/yahoo-placemaker/

======
brandnewlow
I checked this out, and it reminded me of a pet peeve of mine with APIs.

I know this is hacker news and all, but it's annoying when a neat-looking new
api is released like this and the documentation doesn't have any obvious cut-
and-paste examples of Get calls to play around with. They offer up two
examples, but the "examples" don't resemble anything that I can play with or
take action with, I see two code snippets and not much in the way of
explanation.

I find enough APIs like this that I have a text file with sample api calls for
different services that I get out when I go to play around with them as I
can't find cut-and-paste examples of their calls in their documentation.

If anyone can steer me to a URL I can try out (I have an api key), I'd be
appreciative. It's just not clear to me, as a somewhat novice developer how to
use this service without a blunt example.

~~~
sh1mmer
I cooked up something for YQL so you can try it in the YQL console:
[http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20*%20from%...](http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20*%20from%20geo.placemaker%20where%20documentURL%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mnot.net%2Fblog%2F2003%2F12%2F26%2Feurope%22%20and%20documentType%3D%22text%2Fhtml%22%20and%20appid%3D%22EEyPaQrV34FypE_9pTqo_0kVfmvtmgmpDFxXRGLO44C8W4pJVr4JkhAiVMaddrHcvqlm%22&env=http%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltables.env)

Use either documentContent or documentURL to specify what you want to use. I
quite enjoyed trying War and Peace (from Gutenberg) although the whole book is
a bit big for a single request.

Also this my personal API key. So please don't be jerks with it. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I work for Y!

------
mshafrir
<http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/>

Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps
developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in
unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and
returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.

Placemaker provides geo-enrichment for the hugely significant proportion of
Web content that is geographically relevant but not geographically
discoverable. Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places
mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers
(WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was
found in the text, and where in the text it was found. The WOEIDs returned by
the service can be passed to Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet™ API for further geographic
enrichment and discovery.

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. It provides
the geographic developer community with the means to mark-up and index their
content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-
neutral manner, and assists with geographic discovery and aggregation across
the Internet.

------
sfphotoarts
I wasn't able to find any viewport biasing, that would be very useful for
disambiguation. For example, "Im in the Mission right now" is pretty vague
unless I could viewport bias the analysis to 37/-122. Google Geo API offers
this, but last time I tried it it didn't work very well.

I was impressed by this api from Yahoo a lot. It worked really well. I'd
already written my own but this works super fast and reliably. I just need
more control over disambiguation.

------
aditya
It's gone? 404 and no google cache!

Here's some other info though:
[http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/05/20/yahoo-releases-
pl...](http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/05/20/yahoo-releases-placemaker-a-
geo-enrichment-platform/)

------
apalopuss
What's the advantage over a simple GEO microformat?
<http://microformats.org/wiki/geo>

~~~
aditya
You as a publisher or a consumer don't have to actually DO anything, you give
it a chunk of text and it figures out what place you're talking about.

(This is awesome.)

~~~
apalopuss
Thank you for the clarification: this is a lot different from explicitely
specify GEO coordinates...

------
jonknee
This is really great, parsing out locations isn't the easiest problem to roll
yourself. This should open up a lot of interesting mashups.

------
ngrandy
this is very cool, and the beginning of a trend, it seems to me. the whole
semantic web depends on structured information, but it's a pain to structure
information. it makes a lot of sense that the services to structure plain text
will be made available as APIs - eg to extract geo information, date and time
information, contact information, etc.

