13 May 2008

Yahoo opens up the Earth database

Yahoo! has released a developer preview of its new Internet Location Platform. Yahoo!'s geographical database is integrated within the platform, opening up new application opportunities for developers. According to Yahoo, the platform is "designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web".

A unique, permanent identifier, called the Where on Earth ID (WOEID), is assigned to each spatial entity. Thanks to this identifier, locations with similar names can be easily disambiguated. Currently, Yahoo! reports to have recorded about 6 million places categorized hierarchily according to a simple topological model such as country, town and street. This hierarchy is said to allow developers to query the geographic context of every place represented by a WOEID, and obtain its parents, children, and neighbours.

Although natural features have not been yet included in the current beta release, web applications will be able to look up the geolocation ID of several Sports teams like the recent Premiership champion, Manchester United.

With this release, internet developers can easily produce web applications based on geographical location - like the successful Panoramio, a geographical-based image search engine bought by Google in 2007. Yahoo!'s own Flickr also makes use of the opened database to return images taken near a given WOEID.

Additionally, social media application developers and internet verticals with a strong geographical component such as the travel industry will just need to apply a little creativity to make use of this database and build more effective and compelling applications.

In recent months we've seen Google Earth KML become the new standard for sharing maps and we look forward to seeing our favourite search engines developing more initiatives in this direction.

Yahoo! has recently sped up the release frequency of new developments - a powerful way to increase the company value and possibly related to the failed Microsoft approach to take over the Sunnyvale search engine.

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