Today at the Where 2.0 Conference Yahoo announced the release of Placemaker, a new “geo-enrichment” platform. The freely-available platform, which includes an API (our Placemaker API Profile), enables developers and publishers to make applications and data sets location-aware by determining the “whereness” of unstructured content (such as blog posts, new articles, feeds, and web pages).

According to Gary Gale’s post on the Yahoo Geo blog, Placemaker is intended to help make the Internet increasingly hyperlocal:
How does Placemaker Work?
- Developers specify structured and unstructued content; feeds, web
pages, news, status articles, etc.- Placemaker identifies, disambiguates and extracts places
- Placemaker returns geographic metadata, which determines the
whereness of structured and unstructured content

It is exciting to see that Yahoo has released this new service, as it likely to encourage and foster greater accessibility to content that provides both geographic context and intelligence. It will also complement existing services such as the GeoNames RSS to GeoRSS API and the Calais API, both of which identify and extract place-based information.
Documentation for the Placemaker API is available and Yahoo has set up a forum for developers to exchange ideas. With the addition of Placemaker, our Mapping API list now includes 85 API profiles.





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8 Responses to “Yahoo Releases Placemaker: A Geo-Enrichment Platform”
at 6:11 pm
[...] Featured Items See Mashup controversies See top 100 mashups of all time Browse Mashup of the Day winners APIs ranked by popularity Previous Post [...]
at 11:12 am
[...] may remember our earlier post on Yahoo Placemaker, a new “geo-enrichment” platform that includes an API (our Placemaker API Profile) that can be [...]
at 12:21 am
[...] that uses Placemaker (our Placemaker API profile) to find a location from a body of text. When we covered Placemaker’s launch we mentioned its usefulness for geocoding others’ blog posts, as well as newspaper articles. [...]
at 2:13 am
[...] name that sounds similar to Placemaker, though the functionality is slightly different. As we wrote when PlaceMaker launched, it adds geographic data to unstructured content (such as blog posts, new articles, feeds, and web [...]
at 5:44 am
Definitely a useful tool for geocoding blog posts and other articles that don’t otherwise fit any of the other criteria.
at 5:41 am
Sounds very interesting. I have blogs dealing with both tourism and simulation games and it would be nice to use this on posts to show the location when somebody has described a flight they performed, or a holiday destination. Lets hope for a WordPress plugin to this effect.
at 7:58 am
Its sounds good.I have a travel site. I am going to use this method soon.Thanks for you valuable information
at 11:55 am
Placemaker was a cool tool. Local search has continued to grow by leaps and bounds after it was introduced too. Seems now there is barely a day goes by that there isnt some change to the Yahoo or Google local SERPs layout.