Introduction to Geo hacking with (amongst others) Yahoo Technology.

Introduction to Geo hacking with (amongst others) Yahoo Technology. Chris&an Heilmann, Ignite, London, 2nd of March 2010

Geolocation is the new thing.

Good news is that it is not hard to do.

In the following half hour or so I will show you how to solve almost all Geo problems using YQL.

Using YQL in JavaScript:

There are a few different ingredients to playing with geo location.

Finding the current location. Turning a location into a place. Finding a geographical hierarchy. Geo-tagging information. Displaying geo information.

Finding the current location. Finding the current location happens in different ways.

Finding the current location. sniffing. The creepy way - IP

Finding the current location.

Finding the current location. h;p://isithackday.com/hacks/geo/js‐loca&on.html

Finding the current location. The problem with IP sniffing is accuracy.

Finding the current location. The other problem: it is not reliable.

Finding the current location. The non-creepy and more accurate way - the W3C geolocation API.

Finding the current location. Firefox/(Mobile) Safari/Chrome (dev build)

Finding the current location. Another way is of course to get location information from the user’s social presence.

Finding the current location. Plazes, FireEagle, Twitter, Yahoo, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Google Buzz/ Latitude, Dopplr...

Turning a location into a place. Having a latitude and longitude is fine and dandy but it is ambiguous.

Turning a location into a place. The same lat/lon pair could be a lot of things - the centre of a town, a point of interest...

Turning a location into a place. This is why we need to turn lat/lon into something that is human readable.

Turning a location into a place. This is called reverse geocoding and there are a few services for it out there.

Turning a location into a place. My personal favourite (as it works world-wide) is the Flickr reverse geocoder.

Turning a location into a place. h;p://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.findByLatLon.html

Turning a location into a place. You can use this using YQL: select * from ﬂickr.places where lat=51.5142271 and lon=‐0.1289602

Turning a location into a place. To get more in- depth data, use flickr and Yahoo Geo: select * from geo.places where woeid in ( select place.woeid from ﬂickr.places where lat=51.5142271 and lon=‐0.1289602 )

Turning a location into a place.

Turning a location into a place. Quick word on woeid: Use it. (Flickr, Dopplr, Twitter and Yahoo do)

Finding a geographical hierarchy. What’s around a certain location? h;p://developer.yahoo.com/geo/

Turning a location into a place. GeoPlanet gives you hierarchies: Parent, Ancestors, Children, Siblings, Neigbours, BelongTos.

Finding a geographical hierarchy. h;p://isithackday.com/geoplanet‐explorer/?woeid=615702

Finding a geographical hierarchy. h;p://isithackday.com/geoplanet‐explorer/geodrilldown.php

Finding a geographical hierarchy.

Finding the current location. Putting it all together, we can get this: h;p://isithackday.com/hacks/geo/geotest.php

What if you have no location but only a Geo-tagging information. resource?

Geo-tagging information. h;p://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/

Placemaker takes a text, or a web URL Geo-tagging information. and extracts the geographical information from it.

select * from Geo-tagging information. geo.placemaker where documentContent = "Hey I am in Atlanta! I came here from London and will travel onwards to Las Vegas and Sao Paulo" and documentType="text/ plain"

select * from geo.placemaker where Geo-tagging information. documentURL = "h;p://icant.co.uk" and documentType="text/ html" and appid="" select * from geo.placemaker where documentURL = "h;p://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/ newsonline_uk_edi&on/front_page/rss.xml" and documentType="text/rss" and appid=""

Placemaker returns places and Geo-tagging information. references - you can use these to enhance texts with geo information.

To see Placemaker in action, check out Geo-tagging information. the GeoMaker hack. h;p://github.com/codepo8/geomaker

Geo-tagging information. h;p://icant.co.uk/geomaker/

Displaying geo Displaying geo information. information is done via Map APIs

By far the easiest Displaying geo information. way to build a very simple map is to use the Google static maps API.

If you want to use Displaying geo information. Yahoo Maps with the data returned from the earlier YQL calls here’s the code:

Displaying geo information.

If you want to use Displaying geo information. any map provider easily without deep-diving into an API, use Mapstraction.

Displaying geo information. h;p://www.mapstrac&on.com/

That’s it! You have the tools, now find a cause and get geo hacking! h;p://delicious.com/tag/geotoys

Chris&an Heilmann h;p://wait‐&ll‐i.com Cheers h;p://developer‐evangelism.com h;p://twi;er.com/codepo8

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Introduction to Geo hacking with (amongst others) Yahoo Technology.

by Christian Heilmann on Mar 10, 2010

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