Today Yahoo launched a preview of the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. It essentially creates an ID (a Where On Earth ID aka WOEID)for each place on earth and provides the API calls to geocode to and from that ID. It’s very similar to Geonames IDs.
It’s based on the dataset acquired with the acquisition of Whereonearth Limited. The company was created primarily for use on the backend of One its most visible uses was in the creation of the Places feature on Flickr (Radar posts 1 & 2).
Here are some details and examples from the overview page:
The API is accessed via HTTP GET; the following examples can be cut-and-paste into a web browser to view the results (note that these links do not work properly with IE6):
Find the WOEID of a significant landmark:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘sydney%20opera%20house’)
Resolve a WOEID to a place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2507854
Find the WOEID of a specific place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘northfield%20mn%20usa’)
Obtain a range of WOEIDs that match a given place, ordered by the most likely:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘springfield’);start=0;count=5
Find the parent of a given WOEID (and return a detailed record):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/638242/parent?select=long
Return the Placename for a given WOEID in a specific language (where it exists):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘usa’)?lang=fr
To obtain the representation of a place in JSON format:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2487956?format=json
To obtain a list of geographies that neighbor a specific WOEID:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/12795711/neighbors
Rate Limits
Currently, users of the Internet Location Platform are limited to 50k queries per day.
And some more details from their guide:
Coverage
The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform contains about six million places. Coverage varies from country-to-country but globally includes several hundred thousand unique administrative areas with half a million variant names; several thousand historical administrative areas; over two million unique settlements and suburbs, and two-and-a-half million unique postcode points covering about 150 countries, plus a significant number of points of interest, Colloquial Regions, Area Codes, Time Zones, and Islands.
Note: Natural features and water geographies are not included in the current release.
Hierarchy
All geographic entities in the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform exist within a hierarchy. The hierarchy acts as a simple topological model that allows developers to query the geographic context of every place represented by a WOEID, and obtain its parents, children, and neighbors. For example, a list of states in a particular country can be obtained by querying the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform for the children of that country; in a similar manner, the surrounding postcodes of particular postcode can be obtained via a neighbors query.
Language
The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform is UTF-8 compliant and supports location names in multiple languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as well as local double-byte character set data in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan.
Exposing a data set of this magnitude is significant so of course there is a lot more coverage out there for the curious. Dan Catt, one of the resident geo-experts at Flickr and a speaker at Where 2.0, dives into more detail and draws comparisons to the Flickr API. ReadWriteWeb also has an excellent analysis.
The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform offers a great boon to developers by potentially providing a common id for all locations across all apps. These IDs are also backed by one of the best geocoders available. Will developers want to rely on these IDs? It’ll be interesting to hear developer’s thoughts at Where 2.0 this week.