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. Here's more on what developers will have access to.
