Yahoo! Unveils Open Local-Aware Tools and APIs

by Sam Dean - May. 20, 2009Comments (3)

At the Where 2.0 Conference today, Yahoo! announced the beta release of Placemaker, a new Web service from Yahoo! that provides third-party developers with tools to geo-enrich their content and applications, including web pages, feeds, news, blog posts, and more. According to the announcement: "Much of the Web’s unstructured content is not indexed in any sort of geo-relevant way. Placemaker is able to extract explicit or implicit references to geography and location in any unit of text, and return it in an organized fashion. This enables developers and publishers to add geo-intelligence into their content and applications, making them more locally relevant and engaging for users."

Yahoo! also announced the release of GeoPlanet Data, a downloadable resource of the geo data that drives both GeoPlanet (initially introduced in June 2008) and Placemaker, available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Both GeoPlanet and Placemaker use GeoPlanet Data’s millions of place names in multiple languages, with relationships drawn between places. Placemaker is an open API designed to help developers make applications location aware. After a developer feeds structured and unstructured content to Placemaker (you can upload the content to Placemaker for free), it identifes place-related content and returns geographic metadata. There is a guide to Placemaker found here.

Location-aware mobile applications are on the rise. For example, there are many such applications arriving for the iPhone and for the Android operating system. The new Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android Version 1.5 includes faster acquisition of GPS locations, and more location-aware features, as we covered here.

Yahoo!'s goal with the new offerings is to make it easier for publishers and developers to deliver "hyperlocal" place-relevant content. There are further details on Placemaker and location awareness in this post, and more details on Yahoo!'s overall Geo Technologies strategy here.

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by Anna Medlin on May. 20, 2009

Yahoo has been opening up their APIs in a big way with this as well as Yahoo BOSS and others recently. I wonder how adoption is trending.

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by Jack G on May. 21, 2009

This is actually quite neat, since extracting semantic information from pages has always been hit-or-miss, and has been inferred. Now, you can pump a post in and it can determine if you have any address-friendly data in there.

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by Subal Gupta on May. 21, 2009

Mac Mail.app does this too - any email message that contains an address offers an option to look up the address or add it to the address book. It is interesting to see this delivered as a cloud service.

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