Yahoo is letting outside websites use information from its own catalogue of geographic information, thus allowing programmers to employ Yahoo data and services in their own applications.
The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging expert at Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. The catalogue gives locations a numeric identifier — where on Earth IDs (WOEID)s — to various locations.
"Yahoo have opened up their geo-database," Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example is the Sydney Opera House, which has a WOEID of 28717584.
The offering is part of what Yahoo calls the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that's designed to help developers build geographic features into the internet.
More news on this is expected at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, which begins in earnest on Tuesday in California. Yahoo will preview the location platform at the conference, according to the Yahoo Developer Network website. Catt is giving one of those speeches on Wednesday.
The service fits neatly into the Yahoo Open Strategy plan, under which the company is trying to make its website a foundation for other applications, either built directly on Yahoo properties or employing services over the network on outside sites.
The Yahoo Internet Location Platform provides programmers "with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent and language-neutral manner," according to the Yahoo site. "The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and, in turn, unambiguously geo-tag, geo-target and geo-locate data across the web."
According to Yahoo documentation, there are about six million WOEIDs, including postal codes, cities, time zones and suburbs. So far, however, natural features and bodies of water are not included.
According to former Yahoo employee Simon Willison, Yahoo got the geographic data through its 2005 acquisition of Whereonearth.
The WOEID interface permits operations such as translating a place name from one language to another, looking up the WOEID for a landmark, and supplying a list of likely IDs that match a specific place.
It also can let programmers find the "parents" of a specific WOEID. For example, Hearst Castle's parent is the town of San Simeon, whose parent is San Luis Obispo County, whose parent is California, whose parent is the US.
The interface also permits finding neighbours — for example, towns near other towns or countries near other countries. It doesn't assign WOEIDs down to the level of addresses, however.
