Yahoo made a couple of announcements this afternoon at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California that are profoundly different (in certain ways) from the usual geo-stuff we hear from the big search giants.
First of all, the company announced GeoPlanet Data and a related API. Yahoo decided to release the data under a Creative Commons Attribution license, essentially making it free for nothing but a shout-out. GeoPlanet, initially launched last year, provides an open infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the web.
Second of all, Yahoo Placemaker was announced. This is how Yahoo describes it:
“Placemaker provides developers with the means to geo-enrich their content, such as web pages, blog posts, feeds, news articles, status updates, and their applications which make use of such information. Placemaker is an open API; it helps developers to make applications and data sets location aware. Placemaker is not a geocoder, it is a geo-enrichment service that assists in determining the whereness of unstructured content and helps make the Internet increasingly hyper local.”
What’s neat about Placemaker is that it extends beyond the usual geodata applications we’ve been bombarded with since the release of the iPhone, focusing it instead on enriching unstructured, text-based content. Yahoo says that Placemaker “identifies, disambiguates and extracts places” and “returns geographic metadata, which determines the whereness of structured and unstructured content.”
There are plenty of web properties that could benefit from something like this. A platform like Twitter comes to mind. It’s often used via a variety of third-party developed mobile clients, many of which aren’t location-aware. However, a great deal of the time mobile Twitter users manually share their location, even if it’s very general as it is in their profile information. Even desktop Twitter users often mention places or other geographic indicators in their Tweets, and once again their city is often listed in their profile information. Placemaker could pull all of the unstructured text that identifies places from the aggregration of Twitter data and add a layer of relevance and usability to it by filtering what you see on the screen by your location.
Can you think of any interesting uses for the new Yahoo geotechnologies?
