Tuesday, May 13. 2008

Yahoo's New Internet Location Platform

I read a few news article about this new platform, the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, including Dan Katt's blog post but I didn't get it. Those articles, I think, are written for programmers, the folks who'll use the platform. Still, this is it's very cool and I think the rest of us should know what it does! And, frankly, I think too many people are too wrapped up in other platforms to see what's going on at Yahoo. I think Fire Eagle is killer, but I keep talking to people who don't know what it is. I don't want that to happen with YILP, so here's what this new platform is, as I (a non-programmer) understand it.

Yahoo has and uses a big database of location information. It's got points (places of interest), towns and cities, states, and countries in it. Each has an ID, called a WOEID (Where on Earth ID, Yahoo acquired WhereOnEarth a London company in 2005). Yahoo has opened up that database to the world complete with an API (application programming interface). That means programs can ask questions of and receives answers from this big database via a Web service.

Like what? Like:

Give me the WOEID of Boston, MA. (Why? Because maybe you to find pictures of Boston from Flickr. You'd use that value to ask Flickr for the pics.)
Give me the location of 2507854 (Where would you get that? you could get it from Fire Eagle!)
Give me the "next level up" (parent) geography for my point of interest, or in other words, in what city is the Eiffel Tower?
Give me the neighboring ZIP Codes to 12795711 (the WOEID of a ZIP Code).
Another cool one - the ability to ask for the name of a place in a specific language!

Many have already asked for a comparison to Geonames (a free online database with services built on it used by many location-based services to do some of these things). My sense is that Yahoo will tap into the wisdom of the masses to grow this database, just as Geonames does. And, since Yahoo's already aligned with OpenStreetMap, perhaps it can play well with Geonames? Could this database end up as the worlds single place coding database?

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Yahoo at 09:41 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Hi!!!
Pretty interesting to read this article, since i come from a LBS Service providering company, i have a bit of confusion running over my mind.

1.When this database is hit by millions of people from around the world, what will be capability or result of the functionality?
2.When an user opts for a street level query of a particular name; lets say "lincoln lane" in one of the county, i am not pretty sure if the information furnished by the query/search engine will be precise.due to existance of same name in all the county (Not pretty sure, but i had a lot of confusion using google search)
3. If i perform a landmark (POI) search along with a streetname, will the combination workout to produce a result what the user opts for?
4.May be i still think these are still under process for any LBS Service providers.
5.The above examples like " where is Eiffle tower" the answer is france, futher paris, further ?????.
6.If at some stage the user can add his own points & lets say it goes directly into the database, how about location and accuracy of the points to determine the exact co-ordinates. (Not to mention) thats what is happening with google maps, where all around a lot of duplicate location appears on the screen, displaying same name.

Lets hope to see more of yahoo customization into LBS zone..

Regards,
Kalai Selvan

#1 Kalai Selvan (Link) on 2008-05-14 04:09 (Reply)

Kalai, I believe Russ Cowart and friends at i-Cubed might be able to answer your questions regarding accuracy better -- since that seems to be your concern outlined here.

#2 Daniel (Link) on 2008-05-14 06:07 (Reply)

I am waiting from a long time to try this application. Hope this app soon goes public

#3 Harsha (Link) on 2008-05-14 06:44 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Kalai Selvan on 2008-05-14 04:09   #1.1: Daniel on 2008-05-14 06:07 #2: Harsha on 2008-05-14 06:44
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