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Yahoo!

GeoPlanet
Exploring Places (without Maps)
SHIBA SANKAR BEHERA
RAVENSHAW MANAGEMENT CENTRE, CUTTACK
Intro

• Yahoo! Geo Technologies overview

• The issues in and around global geo data

• GeoPlanet Web Service

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Yahoo! Geo Technologies

• Expertise
- Maps:
- global mapping platform and geospatial technologies
- User Location:
- technologies and platforms for detecting and managing user location
- Geo Informatics:
- global ontology of named places, geoparsing & geo-enrichment

• Mission
- Collect the world’s geography as it is used by the worlds people
- Make Location a core component of the entire Yahoo! experience
- Connect the web world with the real world
- Open up Geo Platforms

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Geo-Parsing

• Geo Parsing
- Recognition, Identification, Disambiguation and Retrieval of
named places in text

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

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Geo Parsing – the problems

Is it a place or not a place?

- Person: Joe Orlando, Paris Hilton, Jack London


- Title: Miss Ohio
- Movie: Letters From Iwo Jima, Gran Torino
- Song: 24 Hours From Tulsa
- Company & Products: Waterford Crystal, Bryn Mawr Stereo
- Cars: Chevy Malibu, Chevrolet Corsica
- Clothing: Panama hat, Oxford shoes
- Food: Yorkshire Pudding
- TV: LA Law, CSI Miami, CSI New York, Chicago Hope
- Magazine: デューダ (Doda)

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Geo Parsing – more problems

OK, so what place do you mean?

- Colorado, Texas
- Oregon, Alaska
- Peru, Bolivia
- Peru, Argentina
- Washington, Nevada County, California
- Kansas, Delaware County, Oklahoma
- East Texas, Pennsylvania
- East London, South Africa
- York, New York

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Springfield…doh!

Springfield, Illinois
Springfield, Massachusetts?
Springfield, Missouri?
Springfield, Vermont?
Springfield, Oregon?
One of the other 77 Springfields in the US?
Or one of the 35 other Springfields outside the
US?

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Things that are sent to test us

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Overview

Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a publicly available web service for managing


named places around the globe in a consistent, language-neutral
way. It provides the geographic developer community with the
vocabulary and grammar to traverse the world's geography,
facilitating the geo-enablement of applications relevant to users and
their businesses, by providing a means to recognize, locate and
exploit geo-relevant data across the Web

http://where.yahooapis.com

You’ll need a valid YDN app ID to use GeoPlanet

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GeoPlanet in a Nutshell

• REST API for geographic discovery and mining


• Resource of over 6m named places in 21 languages
• Permanent Identifiers
• Global Coverage, Consistent Framework
• Integrates with Flickr, FireEagle
• Answers questions such as:
- What zipcodes are in the city of Chicago?
- How many ‘Springfields’ are in the US?
• Which is most likely to be the ‘Springfield’ I mean?
- What is the unique ID (WOEID) for ‘The Sydney Opera House’

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the WOEID

• The ‘Where on Earth’ identifier


- assigned to every named place
- 32-bit
- Unique
- Permanent
- Language neutral
• London = Londres = Londra = ロンドン
- Non-Repetitive
- Never Recycled
- Deprecations mapped to successor/replacement
• Requests to the service using a deprecated WOEID are
served transparently.

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WOEIDs – WhereHaus: Global Geographic Ontology

23424977

Pacific States
23689940
Colloquial 23689940
(belongs to)

Country USA
2347563 Oregon
2347596
2347561
Arizona
(ancestor) Nevada
2347587

State Bay Area


California
Colloquial 23511738
(belongs to)
(ancestor)

County Santa Clara


12587712 Santa Cruz
2488853 San Mateo
2488142
(parent) Alameda
2352559

2455920
Mountain View 2488836
Santa Clara
City 2442043
2388327 Los Altos
Cupertino

ZIP 94085
23424676
12797147
94086
12797538
95054
(child) 94089
12797150 12797535
95051

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Resources and Collections

Information in GeoPlanet is organized into collections and


resources

• Resources are unique objects that contain multiple attributes


- Resources use singular names (…place)

• Collections are lists of related resources


- Collections use plural names (…places)

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Place Resource

Usage:
• Get information about a place
Template:
• /v1/place/{woeid}

Examples:
• /v1/place/1 – Get information about the World
• /v1/place/23424977 – Get information about the USA
• /v1/place/2487956 – Get information about San Francisco

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Place Relationship Collections

Usage:
• Get information about places related to a place
Template:
• /v1/place/{woeid}/{relation}
Relations
• Parent 1st degree containing entity
• Children 1st degree contained entities
• Neighbors adjacent peer place types
• Siblings peer place types sharing same parent
• Belongtos collection of containing entities
• Ancestors higher administrative hierarchy

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Some Examples

• /v1/place/1/children.type(Country)
Get list of countries

• /v1/place/2487956/parent
Get parent place of San Francisco

• /v1/place/2487956/belongtos.type(Time+Zone)
Get Olson timezone name for San Francisco

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Some more Examples

• /v1/place/2347563/siblings;count=0
Get list of states (siblings of California)

• /v1/place/23424977/children.type(State)
Get list of states (state children of United States)

• /v1/place/12797497/neighbors
Get list of zip code adjacent to 94089

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Places Collection

Usage:
• Find places that match a place name, and optionally a place
type
Templates:
• /v1/places.q({placename}[,{focus}])[;count={count}]
[;start={start}]
• {placename} must be enclosed in single quotes if it contains
a comma

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Places Collection

Usage:
• Find places that match a place name, and optionally a place
type
• Templates:
• /v1/places$and(.q({placename}[,
{focus}]),.type({placetypes}))[;count={count}]
[;start={start}]
• {placetypes} is a list of up to seven placetypes; each placetype
can be either a place type id (e.g.7) or place type name (e.g.
Town)

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Place Type Names and Codes

• http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/placetypes

• Some examples
- Continent 29
- Country 12
- Admin1 8
- Admin2 9
- Admin3 10
- Town 7
- Suburb 22
- Postal Code 11
- Supername 19
- Colloquial 24
- Time Zone 31

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Some Examples

• /v1/places.q(Springfield) – find most likely place named


“Springfield”
• /v1/places.q(Springfield);count=0 – find all places named
“Springfield”
• /v1/places.q(‘Rome,Italy’) – find Rome, Italy (note quotes
around place name)
• /v1/places.q(‘Roma,Italia’) – find Rome, Italy (using Italian
place name)
• /v1/places$and(.q(Soho),.type(Suburb));count=0 – find
suburbs named “Soho”

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Other Concepts

• Representation
- The short - contains only the most essential information
- The long - includes additional elements
• Language
- RFC4646
• Positional Consistency
- Centroid and Bounding Box
- Longitude/Latitude to WGS84 datum
• Response Formats
- xml=XML
- json=JSON
- geojson=GeoJSON

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References

• YDN landing page – http://developer.yahoo.com/geo

• Documentation – http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/guide

• YDN Developer Reg – http://developer.yahoo.com/ysregapp

• GeoPlanet Forum -
http://developer.yahoo.net/forum/index.php?showforum=31

• Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog - http://www.ygeoblog.com

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Questions

• Martin Barnes – Data Manager – Yahoo! Geo Technologies – UK


- barnes@yahoo-inc.com

• Gary Gale – Head of UK Engineering - Yahoo! Geo Technologies


- garyg@

• Walter Andrag – Lead Engineer – Yahoo! Geo Technologies – UK


- walter@

• Roman Kirillov – Senior Engineer – Yahoo! Geo Technologies – UK


- kirillov@

• “Lots of knowledgeable YDN people” (S. Major – April 09)

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…and Finally. The future.

We will be at Where2.0 in San Jose later this month


http://en.oreilly.com/where2009/
Watch out for more news from Geo Technologies!

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Happy Hacking

Hack Day Haiku…


Give me your content
With love, I will geoparse
And return places
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