PUBLIC MARKS with tag woeid

Our places hierarchy uses Yahoo! GeoPlanet which we access using YQL, both client- and server-side.

Authentication, user profiles, avatars and friend lists come from the Twitter REST API. We use the Twitter Streaming API to track what conference attendees are saying.

GeoPlanet Explorer. Here you can explore the geographical information provided by Yahoo in the GeoPlanet API and data set.

Geoplanet is a database of 5.4 million places in a hierarchy. Each entry has a unique, permanent ID (WOEID), a name and a place type. For example, Homerton (20089379) is a Suburb in the London Borough of Hackney (12695808), which is a LocalAdmin in London (44418), which is a Town in Greater London (23416974), and so on.

n the same vein, our goal is to capture the world’s geography as it is used by the world’s people.

Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.

So what I love about WOE ID is it is a simple non mapping solution to an age old spatial problem. In fact a map is ultimately relegated to just a display function.