Yahoo! is developing an open infrastructure called Open Location to make the internet more location-aware. Open Location aims for open ownership, open exchange of location data across applications and platforms, easy to use open platforms, and using common vocabulary to describe place geography. A key part is Placemaker, which identifies and extracts location information from unstructured content like web pages, then returns geographic metadata to help developers understand the "whereness" of the content. Placemaker uses the freely available GeoPlanet data and returns identifiers and metadata to locate places.

1. Innovating on Open Location Tyler Bell 20 May 2009 [email_address]

2. Webvolution A Geo-Enriched, Location-Aware Internet Web 1.0: Web of Documents Web 2.0: Web of People Web x: Web of the World

3. Yahoo! Open Location Creating an Open Infrastructure for a Location-Aware Internet: Open Ownership: control and transparency Open Exchange: avoid ‘roach motel’ mentality – locations accessible across apps/devices/platforms Open Platforms: easy to use, accessible Open Data: using the same grammar and vocabulary to describe named place geography Part of the Y!OS initiative Open = Ethos and Product

4. Placemaker Developers specify unstructured and atomic content: feeds, web pages, ad creative, status updates, etc. Placemaker identifies, disambiguates, and extracts places Placemaker returns geographic metadata to help developers determine the ‘whereness’ of content 1 2 3

5. Placemaker XML, Text, HTML, RSS, etc. Miami Florida Keys Fort Lauderdale St Petersburg Geo-enrich your unstructured and atomic content: web pages, news feeds, blog posts, status updates, ad titles and creatives Count WOEID Path x3 2450022 /html/body/h1 x2 23511750 /html/body/p x1 2405797 /html/body/h2 x1 2487180 /html/body/h2

6. Freely available No formal rate limit Uses GeoPlanet data Global and multilingual; strongest in EFIGS Returns: WOEIDs Count and occurrence Path and character offset Admin and colloquial scopes Placemaker in a Nutshell

7. Millions of placenames in multiple languages WOEID – permanent unique identifiers Vertical and Neighboring Relationships Now freely available as a tab-delineated download (under Creative Common Attributions ) http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/data GeoPlanet Data

8. Creating a Location-Aware Internet Web 2.0: Web of People Web 1.0: Web of Documents + = Open Location Web x: Web of the World

9. More Information http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ [email_address]