Post on 20-Jan-2015
description
Introduction to Geo hacking with (amongst others)
Yahoo Technology.
Chris&an Heilmann, Ignite, London, 2nd of March 2010
Geolocation is the new thing.
Good news is that it is not hard to do.
In the following half hour or so I will show you how to solve almost all Geo problems using YQL.
Using YQL in JavaScript:
There are a few different ingredients to playing with geo location.
Finding the current location.
Turning a location into a place.
Finding a geographical hierarchy.
Geo-tagging information.
Displaying geo information.
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Finding the current location happens in different ways.
The creepy way - IP sniffing.
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h;p://isithackday.com/hacks/geo/js‐loca&on.html
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The problem with IP sniffing is accuracy.
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The other problem: it is not reliable.
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The non-creepy and more accurate way - the W3C geolocation API.
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Firefox/(Mobile) Safari/Chrome (dev build)
Another way is of course to get location information from the user’s social presence.F
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Plazes, FireEagle, Twitter, Yahoo, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Google Buzz/Latitude, Dopplr...F
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Having a latitude and longitude is fine and dandy but it is ambiguous.
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The same lat/lon pair could be a lot of things - the centre of a town, a point of interest...
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This is why we need to turn lat/lon into something that is human readable.
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This is called reverse geocoding and there are a few services for it out there.
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My personal favourite (as it works world-wide) is the Flickr reverse geocoder.
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h;p://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.findByLatLon.html
You can use this using YQL:
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select * from flickr.places wherelat=51.5142271 and lon=‐0.1289602
To get more in-depth data, use flickr and Yahoo Geo:
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select * from geo.places where woeid in ( select place.woeid from flickr.places where lat=51.5142271 and lon=‐0.1289602)
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Quick word on woeid: Use it. (Flickr, Dopplr, Twitter and Yahoo do)
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What’s around a certain location?
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h;p://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
GeoPlanet gives you hierarchies:
Parent, Ancestors, Children, Siblings, Neigbours, BelongTos.
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h;p://isithackday.com/geoplanet‐explorer/?woeid=615702
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h;p://isithackday.com/geoplanet‐explorer/geodrilldown.php
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Putting it all together, we can get this:
h;p://isithackday.com/hacks/geo/geotest.php
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What if you have no location but only a resource?
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h;p://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/Ge
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Placemaker takes a text, or a web URL and extracts the geographical information from it.
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. select * from geo.placemaker where documentContent = "Hey I am in Atlanta! I came here from London and will travel onwards to Las Vegas and Sao Paulo" and documentType="text/plain"
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. select * from geo.placemaker where documentURL ="h;p://icant.co.uk" and documentType="text/html" and appid=""
select * from geo.placemaker where documentURL ="h;p://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edi&on/front_page/rss.xml"and documentType="text/rss" and appid=""
Placemaker returns places and references - you can use these to enhance texts with geo information.
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To see Placemaker in action, check out the GeoMaker hack.
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h;p://github.com/codepo8/geomaker
h;p://icant.co.uk/geomaker/Ge
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Displaying geo information is done via Map APIs
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By far the easiest way to build a very simple map is to use the Google static maps API.
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<img src=”h;p://maps.google.com/maps/api/sta&cmap?sensor=false&size=200x200&maptype=roadmap&key=YOUR_MAP_KEY&markers=color:blue|label:1|37.4447,‐122.161&markers=color:blue|label:2|37.3385,‐121.886&markers=color:blue|label:3|37.3716,‐122.038&markers=color:blue|label:4|37.7792,‐122.42” alt=””>
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If you want to use Yahoo Maps with the data returned from the earlier YQL calls here’s the code:
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If you want to use any map provider easily without deep-diving into an API, use Mapstraction.
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h;p://www.mapstrac&on.com/
That’s it! You have the tools, now find a cause and get geo hacking!
h;p://delicious.com/tag/geotoys
Chris&an Heilmann h;p://wait‐&ll‐i.com h;p://developer‐evangelism.com h;p://twi;er.com/codepo8
Cheers