At Where 2.0 2008 in Burlingame we announced a developer preview of the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform; a month later in June 2008 this was formally released to the public as Yahoo! GeoPlanet, our open, permanent and intelligent infrastructure for geo data.
Today at Where 2.0 2009 in San Jose, we’ve announced the public release of GeoPlanet Data, a downloadable resource of the geo data that underpins both GeoPlanet and Placemaker™.
GeoPlanet Data is a freely available, tab delineated download which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Both GeoPlanet and Placemaker use GeoPlanet Data’s:
- millions of place names in multiple languages
- WOEIDs – Geo Technologies’ unique and permanent identifiers
- vertical and neighbouring relationships for each place
We’ve been amazed at the creative uses the the developer community has put GeoPlanet to; we’re looking forward to hearing how the latest piece of Geo Technlogies’ vision of Open Location is used; keep in touch and let us know on the GeoPlanet Forum.
Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies
Tags: creativecommons, GeoPlanet, geoplanetdata, openlocation
[...] of all, the company announced GeoPlanet Data and a related API. Yahoo decided to release the data under a Creative Commons Attribution license, essentially [...]
Yahoo – big thanks for the data.
Open data is great! However, it’s unfortunate that the planet download does not include any geographic data. At the very least centroid latitude & Longitude – or even polygon or bounding box are necessary to make this data actually useful for anything other than a simple textual join.
For visualization or analysis, more complete data would be required. What would it take to really open up this data?
[...] for Geo Technologies’ products and information. With the launch of Yahoo! Placemaker™ and GeoPlanet Data at Where 2.0 in San Jose earlier today there’s been a bit of renovation going on behind the [...]
Thank you very much! I hope this generosity will pay off, and have no doubt it can. Releasing this as open data makes WOEID a very interesting standard now.
@ajturner – I definitely agree, but check out the Flickr shapefiles! http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/05/21/flickr-shapefiles-public-dataset-10/
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