Yahoo has just released Placemaker, a geo-enrichment tool for the web contents geared for developers. Yahoo’s official description of Placemaker service:
… 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.
Yahoo Placemaker allows developers to geo-enrich web pages, blog posts, feeds, news articles, status updates and the applications which use this information.
Being an open API which works under GeoPlanet data, Yahoo Placemaker enables developers to add extra layer of geo-intelligence to their web contents to create their own location-based service. It’s basically a tool for making the whole of the Internet hyper local.
Basically, what Yahoo Placemaker does is to identify, disambiguates, and extracts places information on unstructured content, and then returns geographic metadata which identify the “whereness” of these contents.
Yahoo Placemaker competes with a similar Google service – Geolocation API.
As Yahoo Placemaker is an open API, non-Yahoo sites including Twitter and Facebook can make full use of this service to add geo-location features to their sites.
