The First Annual Geo-Year Review

December 18th, 2009 at 2:20 pm | posted by Gary Gale | in Geo Technologies

The season of Christmas, Snow, Holidays, New Year, eating too much and getting caught up in the inevitable Christmas travel chaos is fast approaching but before we hang up our stockings for Santa to geotag, what sort of a geo-year was 2009?

In January we decided that people seemed to be having far too much fun on Twitter and we launched @yahoogeo on an unsuspecting world. GeoPlanet, launched at Where 2.0 in Burlingame in 2008 went from strength to strength and we helped host one of the London #geomob meetups.

In February we set out the “non golden rules of Geo“, which state

  1. Any attempt to codify a series of geo rules into a formal, one size fits all, taxonomy will fail due to Rule 2.
  2. Geo is bizarre, odd, eclectic and utterly human.
  3. People will in the main agree with Rule 1 with the exception of the rules governing their own region, area or country, which they will think are perfectly logical.
  4. People will, in the main, think that postal, administrative and colloquial hiearachies are one and the same thing and will overlap.
  5. Taking Rule 4 into account, they will then attempt to codify a one size fits all geo taxonomy.
  6. There is no Rule 6, see Rule 1.

Then in May we built upon the success of GeoPlanet and launched Placemaker and GeoPlanet Data at Where 2.0 in San Jose. A lot of people liked this.

In June we took our Open Location concept on the road and we turned up at a few conferences and talked for as long as we could get away with it on matters geo including WOEIDS, GeoPlanet, Fire Eagle and Placemaker. From London, to San Jose, by way of Palo Alto, Amsterdam, Southampton, Stratford-upon-Avon, Munich and Harrogate the geo message reached an amazing set of audiences in Where 2.0, WhereCamp, State of the Map, GeoCommunity, #geomob, Telematics, mashup* and the Association for Geographic Information, to name but a few. This took up almost the remainder of the year.

And finally in October, after a brief holiday, we brought GeoPlanet Data back online. A lot of people liked this.

So to 2010; what’s coming up next year. We’ve got some new products bubbling away which we hope you’ll like; all WOEID enabled of course. We’ll continue to be at some conferences and will be at Location Based Services Evolution 2010 in Berlin, Embedded Mobility 2010 in London, Where 2.0 in San Jose, Telematics in Detroit and State of the Map in Girona.

Have a geotastic Holiday season and a geotagged New Year.

Gary Gale, Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

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Of Duplicates, Line Endings, PlaceTypes and Other Data Critters

November 26th, 2009 at 1:35 pm | posted by Gary Gale | in Geo Technologies

The GeoPlanet Data download contains places, a lot of places; almost 5.5M of them if you’re of a mind to count them all. Then there’s the adjacencies, or neighbours, there’s over 8.5M of them and the aliases, there’s almost 2M of them.

That’s a reasonable amount of data.

Naturally we do our best to ensure that it’s fully QA’d before we release it and that it’s as error free as is possible. But sometimes errors, minor niggles and other pesky data critters slip through.

i iz in ur GeoPlanet Data messin with ur WOEIDz

The first critter is some duplicated WOEIDs; these were spotted by GJ (Zorgspliff). A small set of Indian postcode WOEIDs were duplicated and ended up with MSDOS line endings. This was due to a back-end processing error which categorised these postcodes as both current and historical.

The next critter is less a critter and more a need for clarity. Each WOEID has a placetype and Alison Wheeler (AlisonW) commented that some of the placetypes appeared to be duplicated, such as “Street“, which looks like it has placetype 4 and placetype 6. Actually, there’s two different sorts of “Street” placetype, which you can see clearly if you look at the long form of the placetype display on GeoPlanet:

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/placetypes?select=long&appid=

Placetypes 1 through 5 can be considered for future use; we’re not currently using them and you won’t come across them in the GeoPlanet Data.

The current, v7.4, release of GeoPlanet Data has two of these data critters; naturally we’ve fixed them for the next release but we wanted to point them out to you rather than let you find them for yourself.

Gary Gale, Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

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WOEIDS Are Trending On Twitter

November 10th, 2009 at 3:58 pm | posted by Gary Gale | in Geo Technologies

As we’ve mentioned before in this blog, the Geo Technologies group are aptly geographically disparate, split across Sunnyvale CA, London UK and Bangalore India. The London part of the group are responsible for the care, feeding and well being of our WOEIDs but while we were asleep last night in WOEID 44418 something big happened in WOEID 2487956.

Twitter are going to be using WOEIDs to help people track trending topics, in real time, by their location, so helping to answer the perennial question “what’s happening where I am?”. Twitter understands the power and flexibility that geotagging by WOEID yields:

“We’re using Yahoo!’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to name each location that we have information for — we’re doing so because those IDs give not only language-agnostic, but also permanent, stable, and unique identifiers for geographic locations”

The WOEIDs returned by the Twitter API can be easily used with any other API which knows how to speak WOEIDs, such as Flickr, Fire Eagle and GeoPlanet, which in turn adds to success of our Open Location ethos.

You can read the full announcement post on the Twitter API Announcement list together with complemenatary coverage over on TechCrunch.

(WOEID 44418 is London and WOEID 2487956 is San Francisco by the way).

Gary Gale, Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

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