Yahoo! introduces Placemaker To Geo-enrich Your Content

Yahoo! Geo Technologies announced at Where 2.0 in San Jose, California with the launch of a new web service Yahoo! Placemaker as a part of their vision of Open Location. The new release followed the Yahoo! GeoPlanet that is an attempt to bridge  the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, perennial, and intelligent infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the Internet. Basically Placemaker is an open API that assists the developers in making applications and data sets location aware. The services has been designed to equip the developers with the means to geo-enrich their content, such as web pages, blog posts, status updates, feeds, news articles, as well as their applications which make use of such information.  It is a geo-enrichment service that assists in determining the location of unstructured content and helps make the Internet increasingly hyper local.

Let’s get into the details of Placemaker

How to access Placemaker?

Placemaker is open and free geo-enrichment tool that is easily accessible. You would require an Application Id. Currently, there4 are no formal rate imposed. Just follow the steps below to access Placemaker

Step 1: Go through the online documentation and user guide at here

Step 2: Get the Application ID here

Step 3: Now POST your content here and provide the Application Id

Working of Placemaker

Placemaker allows the developers to specify the structured and unstructured content, web pages, feeds, news, status article etc. It identifies and extracts the location. It reels back the geographical metadata that specifies the whereness of structured and unstructured content.

Placemaker’s Compatibility with Yahoo!

The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group aims to connect the users around the world. Yahoo! collects and creates content and distributes it to the users in an effective way. The Geographical factor plays an important role in distribution of information. The Placemaker is an effort to join the Web world with the real world. Yahoo!’s Placemaker is expected to help the developers and publishers make the application and data sets aware of the location by determining the whereness of unstructured content.

Earlier Yahoo! had introduced Fire Eagle last fall. It acts as a location broker that allows users to take their location to the Web. The users would have full control over the data with Fire Eagle. Further, they choose the third party application to share their location. At what resolution or granularity they wish to expose it. The search is broader as country or state as a long/lat coordinate and everything in between.

The core idea is that location aware systems provide a more topical more relevant user experience. The users interact with the Internet and specifically Yahoo! It provides them with the most geo-relevant information available.

To find out more…

Placemaker

Placemaker Guide

Placemaker Forum