Tyler Bell On Yahoo's Open Location API

blackbearnh writes "Yahoo! has been working for a while to promote a unified system for referring to places, through their Where On Earth IDs. Using a WOEID, you can query Yahoo's publicly available APIs to find out things like what cities are in a county, or what counties border each other. In an interview for O'Reilly Radar, Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, talks about their Open Location program (not to be confused with openlocation.org, a different group altogether). He also talks about how privacy concerns interact with the increasing use of personal geotracking, and the troublesome problem of what to call places. 'I'm not even going to tell you about the problems we had when we accidentally called Constantinople Byzantium, just slipping back about 800 years there accidentally. That's a very sensitive issue. Any company dealing with geography is going to have to address it somehow. So I'll be very candid in how Yahoo addresses this. I mean first, our stated goal is to capture the world's geography as it is used by the world's people. We don't see ourselves as the definitive authority on how a place should be called.'"

Why?

[slashtivus]

Finding what cities are in a county? Finding bordering counties?

This has already been done. I have 6 year old software that could do most of this. And in that software it was already old-hat. It's called GIS.

TIGER data (free from the Federal government / census) has it, as well as many other (non-free) sources.

Re-creating all of this from scratch seems a lot like re-inventing the wheel.

Ummm

[Dodder]

Isn't this also known as latitude and longitude? Or is that too 20th Century?

Re:Another Mapping service, with Historical facts?

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be only that they're only trying to make another mapping service. While that seems pointless given Google's lead (in time and talent), Yahoo may see it as crucial to their own relevance to advertisers to expand into geographically sophisticated results to queries. They may believe that the appoaching mobile-device dominance means not being able to relate things spatially will seem like an internet with a 'sense' cut off. Also not all of their effort will duplicate Google's. A few innovations, patents, and good sized databases will make them a more attractive purchase to Google, even though Yahoo has no ultimate hope of matching them in the market.

Re:Why?

[linguizic]

Yes, but can you simply type "what county borders Contra Costa County, CA to the south?"?* I think this kind of functionality is what they are striving for.

*Yes I know my punctuation's off, this is what makes the most sense to me damn it!

Re:Simple test

[!coward]

*raises hand* Sorry, Taiwan is an island _in_ China? Umm, so Hawaii is an island _in_ the USA?

The ambiguous way to go, without actually offending anyone, is to say that Taiwan is a chinese island (which China is another matter), or an island in the Sea of China, or even that it is an island off the south-eastern coast of China.

Re:Why?

[Quixote]

Wow! If only they'd talked to you first.

BTW... can you point me to which TIGER/ZIP file contains the information for Istanbul? Or how about Casablanca, Morocco? And which county (district) contains the town of Aleppy, Kerala, India?

Thanks! Much appreciate it.

You know, America isn't the center of the known world.