Tyler Bell On Yahoo's Open Location API 76
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.'"
Simple test (Score:5, Interesting)
Always a fun test of any geolocation system:
Taiwan.
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why they changed it, I can't say. People just liked it better that way.
Re:Another Mapping service, with Historical facts? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just "yet another mapping service." He's saying that the service will provide spatially relevant information, that the API will add value to the information (from both Yahoo and user-contributed sources), and how overcoming the difficulties isn't as simple as scratching out a few requirements.
One example might be if I searched for "ATM" and I was on the freeway when I made the request, it would search for ATMs around the nearest exit ramp instead of the nearby store on the other side of the fence. Or maybe it would incorporate police reports about snatch and grabs in the area, so I'd choose a different ATM.
Or perhaps if I'm in Minneapolis and I search for Miami hotels, it'll look in south Florida, but if I'm in Oxford, Ohio, it might find one near the university.
As for their added value, perhaps they'd put ads for restaurants near the ATM.