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.
Geo-enrichment service
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3 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. [...]