Slashdot Mirror
Tyler Bell On Yahoo's Open Location API
blackbearnh writes "Yahoo! has been working for a while to promote a unified system for referring to places, through their Where On Earth IDs. Using a WOEID, you can query Yahoo's publicly available APIs to find out things like what cities are in a county, or what counties border each other. In an interview for O'Reilly Radar, Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, talks about their Open Location program (not to be confused with openlocation.org, a different group altogether). He also talks about how privacy concerns interact with the increasing use of personal geotracking, and the troublesome problem of what to call places. 'I'm not even going to tell you about the problems we had when we accidentally called Constantinople Byzantium, just slipping back about 800 years there accidentally. That's a very sensitive issue. Any company dealing with geography is going to have to address it somehow. So I'll be very candid in how Yahoo addresses this. I mean first, our stated goal is to capture the world's geography as it is used by the world's people. We don't see ourselves as the definitive authority on how a place should be called.'"
Yahoo! has also done a fairly good job of supporting initiatives like Open Street Map (the Wikipedia of online maps). Google... just buys map data from the usual suspects. Support free information. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Long-lat will only get you position not the name or the contained geographical names -- what they do is actually pretty cool -- they will tell you that Rome is in province of Lazio which is in Italy which is in Europe, and they will tell you that down to zip level and tell you what the names is of all the surrounding areas on each level.
The summary indicates that it is a new 'tagging' system, but in reality it is mostly about a better language parser (There are already some very good ones). The summary indicates that they are trying to to a "re-naming" of all this. A parser results in: "California", "Counties", [Contra Costa] => [borders].
This already exists many times over. There are many systems where everything is already numbered, Geo-coded, cross-correlated, and tagged with names.
The road maps in Cyprus don't acknowledge the fact that half the island is effectively another country. There's just a vague wording saying "Area inaccessible due to Turkish Occupation". How do you plan a route round that without upsetting anyone ?