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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.'"
Taco Bell. That sounds good right about now!
Wha? /Tyler/ Bell? Who wants to eat floor tile, or for that matter, the floor tiler? Taco Bell has floor tiles...
Honestly, it looked like Taco Bell to me when I first glanced at the feed and I wondered what that had to do with Yahoo. Yes, I /am/ hungry. How'd you know?
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
I kind of wished umm already that like you used grammar or what english is to be understood? It's just that other lines, and yes you're in the minds of the moderators, already and so on. But run on and something sentences are like in the understanding my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. And you are my boy, oh yes... taste my milkshake, for I have already won.