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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.'"
I just engage in triangulation by yodeling repeatedly with my buddies to establish locations.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks
Always a fun test of any geolocation system:
Taiwan.
This has already been done. I have 6 year old software that could do most of this. And in that software it was already old-hat. It's called GIS.
TIGER data (free from the Federal government / census) has it, as well as many other (non-free) sources.
Re-creating all of this from scratch seems a lot like re-inventing the wheel.
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.
Isn't this also known as latitude and longitude? Or is that too 20th Century?
Why they changed it, I can't say. People just liked it better that way.
It's not just "yet another mapping service." He's saying that the service will provide spatially relevant information, that the API will add value to the information (from both Yahoo and user-contributed sources), and how overcoming the difficulties isn't as simple as scratching out a few requirements.
One example might be if I searched for "ATM" and I was on the freeway when I made the request, it would search for ATMs around the nearest exit ramp instead of the nearby store on the other side of the fence. Or maybe it would incorporate police reports about snatch and grabs in the area, so I'd choose a different ATM.
Or perhaps if I'm in Minneapolis and I search for Miami hotels, it'll look in south Florida, but if I'm in Oxford, Ohio, it might find one near the university.
As for their added value, perhaps they'd put ads for restaurants near the ATM.
John
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 ?