Most recently - May 20, the company Yahoo! announced the release of its new product, which currently has no analogues - Yahoo! Placemaker , a geo-parsing service whose main purpose is to extract geo-relevant information from documents of various formats. The presentation was, as they say, “with a big crowd” and ended with “applause turning into an ovation” - the idea and the implementation definitely liked, and for some time on Twitter you could see a rather positive flow of comments on this topic. But the presentation is over, everyone goes home, and they start asking questions: so what is it?

What is Placemaker

As already mentioned, Placemaker is a web service that allows you to extract geo-relevant information from a certain document. There are several points that need clarification. Firstly, what are these documents from which information can be extracted? And secondly, what is this geo-relevant information, and most importantly - who needs it and why?

With documents, everything is quite simple. At the moment, Placemaker supports text (well, it is in Africa text), HTML documents (although not everything is so simple), as well as XML-based news aggregation formats - RSS and Atom. In addition, Placemaker "understands" the RSS and Atom extension, known as GeoRSS , and is also able to extract additional information from microformats that are embedded in an HTML document. About the information and should talk in more detail.
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What Placemaker can do

In short, all the possibilities of PlaceMaker can be defined in three groups, namely:

• What places (geographical) are mentioned in the document and what is their importance?
• Among all the places with the same name, which is specifically mentioned in the document?
• What is the place in the document as a whole?

We illustrate these two concepts with an example. Take a typical news article . Even without reading it, one can single out, firstly, that this article is about Pakistan and “about something like that”, and secondly, by quickly scanning the text, one can single out specific geographic names - Pakistan, Islamabad, the USA (well where without them!), and several others. That’s what Placemaker is all about - to say “what” this article in a geographic sense and list geographical names, sorting them out - if necessary - by importance.

In addition, it should be noted that the problem of places with the same name - perhaps the most difficult, which the developers decided when developing Placemaker. For example, did you know that there are 11 places called Islamabad? Or 23 London? Or 47 york? As well as 29 places with the name "Moscow", 8 - with the name "Samara" and 234 San Jose? Of course, some of them are more popular, and some less, but you need to choose something that’s not popular, but correct!

How to use Placemaker

The question of specific use remains at the discretion of the user of the service - but there can be a lot of options, ranging from geographical categorization of news articles and searching for references to this particular Springfield in a large set of documents, ending with very esoteric ones, like drawing an intensity map on Twitter about a specific location. And this is only text - if we consider RSS / Atom, the task that is solved with the help of Placemaker in almost one action is to turn RSS into GeoRSS, that is, adding geographic information to the stream. For example, one of the groups in Yahoo! made a great demo application that collected RSS feeds from many sources around the world, “let through” them through PlaceMaker, and then showed on the map how the intensity of news about a particular region changed over time (it was very funny to see a huge " bubble throughout Mexico during general hysteria about swine flu).

reference Information

Some facts about Placemaker.

• Placemaker uses WoEID (Where On Earth ID) numeric identifiers to designate places. The use of such an identifier allows you to unequivocally say what place we are talking about (as opposed to the name and coordinates). The full set of WOEID is currently available for download by developers (and will be updated).
• Placemaker uses the same platform as Yahoo! Geoplanet , with which, by the way, you can play around here - and FireEagle.
• Placemaker is a web service that is able to receive requests in POST and REST formats, and produce results either in XML, a predefined schema, or in GeoRSS format
• In order to use Placemaker, a developer simply needs to get the Application ID on the Yahoo! Developer Network
• Placemaker is free, as is GeoPlanet Data - a database of WOEIDs and related information
• Placemaker supports 27 languages, among which - to my great regret - there is still no Russian (however, I don’t give up hope that the situation will change).
• In order to play with Placemaker, you can use a minimalistic demo service that Rasmus Lerdorf (author of PHP) wrote, I think, overnight - since no more than half a day has passed since the announcement of the public API. In addition, the forum will publish links to new products that use Placemaker (for obvious reasons, there are quite a few of them :))
• It is best to start learning Placemaker from the official YDN page , where you can read the user manual (which is highly recommended for studying) and ask questions in a forum that will be monitored by the developers.

And finally

Placemaker is a beta. And not the “eternal beta”, as is often the case with other companies, and until the developers catch the beta and fix it - no, not all, but so many bugs that the beta prefix can be removed. Therefore, if you think you have found a bug - do not keep it to yourself! :) Write to the developers in the forum - they will thank you and fix you as soon as they can. The same applies to the functionality that is insanely needed, but for some strange reason was not included in this release - write, and you will have everything!

Update: And I add a few links to demos and mash-ups that use PlaceMaker:

• isithackday.com/hacks/placemaker/map.php
• hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001856.html

The list will be expanded!