In June of 2008 we launched GeoPlanet, our open, permanent and intelligent infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the Internet, on this blog and a lot of people wrote to us to say they liked it a lot. Some eight months later and GeoPlanet is being used in a wide range of differing ways. Here’s just a sample to re-whet your appetite …
Jim Hamilton seems to like GeoPlanet; so much so that he’s produced three mashups which exercise the power of the GeoPlanet API.
First up is YPlaces, which was written primarily to explore the scope of the GeoPlanet API and which offers a visual way of exploring the key concepts of GeoPlanet. Enter a place name and YPlaces will show a map of the place and its coordinates. You can then view the siblings, the children, the neighbours and the belongs-to of your chosen place, all of which are clickable and update the map.
Then there’s Zyp, a mashup of US ZIP codes, GeoPlanet, Google reverse geocoding, ZIP and county polygons and a dash of Virtual Earth. Entering a place will display a list of possible disambiguations. Select one and you can query GeoPlanet to view output the of GeoPlanet place, children, siblings and neighbours functions.
Finally, there’s SakMap, which Jim calls the Swiss Army Knife of maps (SAK … Swiss Army Knife … get it?). The centre point of a map is reverse geocoded and the resultant city name is handed to GeoPlanet which looks up the WOEIDs of the child places, each of which can be viewed. You can also get weather reports for the current place, view an alternate map rendition via Microsoft Virtual Earth, get news, video and pictures via Flickr and even do a web search based on the place name.
All of Jim’s mashups show off the various features of GeoPlanet and it’d be great if the scope of these mashups could be extended outside of the US, such as to Europe or Asia.
In October 2008, our friends at Flickr released shape files via the Flickr API. About a month later and Tom Taylor used this new API to produce Boundaries which helps you visualise the shape data. Type in a place name and the GeoPlanet API is used to work out the place’s neighbours and display them boldly and elegantly on a map.
Also in October 2008, <head> staged a web conference on topics such as web development, Flash, accessibility and web standards that took place entirely online. You could customise the schedule to display in your local time zone; clicking on a map for your location reverse geocoded the place, used GeoPlanet to lookup the time zone for that place and then used the Olson database to display the schedule relative to you time zone. This meant that people in London got a uniquely customised and relevant experience, as did people all over the world.
This is a pretty unique use of GeoPlanet; it’s a mashup but one which happens behind the scenes without most people being aware of it, so much credit should go to the authors of the site who took the time to call out the web APIs used.
Last year on this blog, we wrote about the way in which GeoPlanet had been integrated into YQL, the Yahoo! Query Language. Yahoo! Flash and Flex developer Zach Graves provides a real world tutorial on how to use YQL with Yahoo! Weather. One of the challenges that Zach encountered was converting potentially ambiguous locations into a more structured and canonical format; by using the GeoPlanet API integrated into YQL has was able to normalise place names and pass them straight into the Yahoo! Weather API.
We’re always on the lookout for other uses of GeoPlanet; if you know of one then let us know about it; the best place to do this is through the Applications & Demos GeoPlanet Forum.
Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies