Yahoo! GeoPlanetExploring Places (without Maps)

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Intro

• Yahoo! Geo Technologies overview

• The issues in and around global geo data

• GeoPlanet Web Service

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Yahoo! Geo Technologies

• Expertise-Maps: - global mapping platform and geospatial technologies-User Location: - technologies and platforms for detecting and managing user location-Geo Informatics:- global ontology of named places, geoparsing & geo-enrichment

• Mission-Collect the world’s geography as it is used by the worlds people-Make Location a core component of the entire Yahoo! experience-Connect the web world with the real world-Open up Geo Platforms

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Geo-Parsing

• Geo Parsing-Recognition, Identification, Disambiguation and Retrieval of named places in text

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

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Geo Parsing – the problems

Is it a place or not a place?

-Person: Joe Orlando, Paris Hilton, Jack London-Title: Miss Ohio-Movie: Letters From Iwo Jima, Gran Torino-Song: 24 Hours From Tulsa-Company & Products: Waterford Crystal, Bryn Mawr Stereo-Cars: Chevy Malibu, Chevrolet Corsica-Clothing: Panama hat, Oxford shoes-Food: Yorkshire Pudding-TV: LA Law, CSI Miami, CSI New York, Chicago Hope-Magazine: デューダ (Doda)

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Geo Parsing – more problems

OK, so what place do you mean?

- Colorado, Texas

- Oregon, Alaska

- Peru, Bolivia

- Peru, Argentina

- Washington, Nevada County, California

- Kansas, Delaware County, Oklahoma

- East Texas, Pennsylvania

- East London, South Africa

- York, New York

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Springfield…doh!

Springfield, Illinois

Springfield, Massachusetts?

Springfield, Missouri?

Springfield, Vermont?

Springfield, Oregon?

One of the other 77 Springfields in the US?

Or one of the 35 other Springfields outside the US?

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Things that are sent to test us

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Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a publicly available web service for managing named places around the globe in a consistent, language-neutral

way. It provides the geographic developer community with the vocabulary and grammar to traverse the world's geography,

facilitating the geo-enablement of applications relevant to users and their businesses, by providing a means to recognize, locate and

exploit geo-relevant data across the Web

http://where.yahooapis.com

You’ll need a valid YDN app ID to use GeoPlanet

Overview

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• REST API for geographic discovery and mining

• Resource of over 6m named places in 21 languages

• Permanent Identifiers

• Global Coverage, Consistent Framework

• Integrates with Flickr, FireEagle

• Answers questions such as:

- What zipcodes are in the city of Chicago?

- How many ‘Springfields’ are in the US?

• Which is most likely to be the ‘Springfield’ I mean?

- What is the unique ID (WOEID) for ‘The Sydney Opera House’

GeoPlanet in a Nutshell

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the WOEID

• The ‘Where on Earth’ identifier-assigned to every named place-32-bit-Unique-Permanent-Language neutral

• London = Londres = Londra = ロンドン

-Non-Repetitive-Never Recycled-Deprecations mapped to successor/replacement

• Requests to the service using a deprecated WOEID are served transparently.

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94086 9408995051

9505494085(child)

ZIP

WOEIDs – WhereHaus: Global Geographic Ontology

City

Santa Clara(parent)

County

California(ancestor)

State

Mountain ViewCupertino Los Altos

Santa Clara

Santa Cruz San MateoAlameda

Oregon ArizonaNevada

USA(ancestor)

Country

Bay Area(belongs to)Colloquial

Pacific States(belongs to)

Colloquial

23424676

12587712

23424977

2347563

2368994023689940

2351173823511738

23475962347587

2347561

24888532352559

2488142

2455920

2388327

2488836

12797538127971471279753512797150

2442043

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Resources and Collections

Information in GeoPlanet is organized into collections and resources

• Resources are unique objects that contain multiple attributes-Resources use singular names (…place)

• Collections are lists of related resources-Collections use plural names (…places)

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Place Resource

Usage:

• Get information about a place

Template:• /v1/place/{woeid}

Examples:• /v1/place/1 – Get information about the World

• /v1/place/23424977 – Get information about the USA

• /v1/place/2487956 – Get information about San Francisco

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Place Relationship Collections

Usage:

• Get information about places related to a place

Template:

• /v1/place/{woeid}/{relation}

Relations

• Parent 1st degree containing entity

• Children 1st degree contained entities

• Neighbors adjacent peer place types

• Siblingspeer place types sharing same parent

• Belongtos collection of containing entities

• Ancestors higher administrative hierarchy

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Some Examples

• /v1/place/1/children.type(Country)

Get list of countries

• /v1/place/2487956/parent

Get parent place of San Francisco

• /v1/place/2487956/belongtos.type(Time+Zone)

Get Olson timezone name for San Francisco

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• /v1/place/2347563/siblings;count=0

Get list of states (siblings of California)

• /v1/place/23424977/children.type(State)

Get list of states (state children of United States)

• /v1/place/12797497/neighbors

Get list of zip code adjacent to 94089

Some more Examples

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Places Collection

Usage:

• Find places that match a place name, and optionally a place type

Templates:• /v1/places.q({placename}[,{focus}])[;count={count}][;start={start}]

• {placename} must be enclosed in single quotes if it contains a comma

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Usage:

• Find places that match a place name, and optionally a place type

• Templates:

• /v1/places$and(.q({placename}[,{focus}]),.type({placetypes}))[;count={count}][;start={start}]

• {placetypes} is a list of up to seven placetypes; each placetype can be either a place type id (e.g.7) or place type name (e.g. Town)

Places Collection

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Place Type Names and Codes

• http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/placetypes

• Some examples- Continent 29- Country 12- Admin1 8- Admin2 9- Admin3 10- Town 7- Suburb 22- Postal Code 11- Supername 19- Colloquial 24- Time Zone 31

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Some Examples

• /v1/places.q(Springfield) – find most likely place named “Springfield”

• /v1/places.q(Springfield);count=0 – find all places named “Springfield”

• /v1/places.q(‘Rome,Italy’) – find Rome, Italy (note quotes around place name)

• /v1/places.q(‘Roma,Italia’) – find Rome, Italy (using Italian place name)

• /v1/places$and(.q(Soho),.type(Suburb));count=0 – find suburbs named “Soho”

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Other Concepts

• Representation- The short - contains only the most essential information

- The long - includes additional elements

• Language- RFC4646

• Positional Consistency- Centroid and Bounding Box- Longitude/Latitude to WGS84 datum

• Response Formats- xml=XML- json=JSON-geojson=GeoJSON

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References

• YDN landing page – http://developer.yahoo.com/geo

• Documentation – http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/guide

• YDN Developer Reg – http://developer.yahoo.com/ysregapp

• GeoPlanet Forum - http://developer.yahoo.net/forum/index.php?showforum=31

• Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog - http://www.ygeoblog.com

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Questions

• Martin Barnes – Data Manager – Yahoo! Geo Technologies – UK- barnes@yahoo-inc.com

• Gary Gale – Head of UK Engineering - Yahoo! Geo Technologies - garyg@

• Walter Andrag – Lead Engineer – Yahoo! Geo Technologies – UK- walter@

• Roman Kirillov – Senior Engineer – Yahoo! Geo Technologies – UK- kirillov@

• “Lots of knowledgeable YDN people” (S. Major – April 09)

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…and Finally. The future.

We will be at Where2.0 in San Jose later this month

http://en.oreilly.com/where2009/

Watch out for more news from Geo Technologies!

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Happy Hacking

Hack Day Haiku…Give me your contentWith love, I will geoparseAnd return places