Simon Willison’s Weblog

geocode-sqlite. Neat command-line Python utility by Chris Amico: point it at a SQLite database file and it will add latitude and longitude columns and populate them by geocoding one or more of the other fields, using your choice from four currently supported geocoders. # 17th May 2021, 1:15 am

Royal Mail: closing job search over data dispute while sacking workers. The Royal Mail have cease-and-desisted ernestmarples.com, a free postcode geocoding API which powers a number of UK open democracy sites. One of the sites is Job Centre Pro Plus, creating a perfect opportunity for an ORG press release. # 5th October 2009, 3:39 pm

geocoders. A fifteen minute project extracted from something else I’m working on—an ultra simple Python API for geocoding a single string against Google, Yahoo! Placemaker, GeoNames and (thanks to Jacob) Yahoo! Geo’s web services. # 27th May 2009, 10:02 am

JS-Placemaker—geolocate texts in JavaScript. Chris Heilmann exposed Placemaker to JavaScript (JSONP) using a YQL execute table. Try his examples—I’m impressed that “My name is Jack London, I live in Ontario” returns just Ontario, demonstrating that Placemaker’s NLP is pretty well tuned. # 23rd May 2009, 12:36 am

Yahoo! Placemaker. Really exciting new API from Yahoo!—Placemaker accepts a block of text (or a URL to HTML or RSS) and extracts and returns geographical locations mentioned in the text. I just ran my djng blog entry through it and it pulled out “Prague” as the only location mentioned. This should be really useful for adding geodata to existing textual content. # 20th May 2009, 9:34 pm

CloudMade: A Summary of the Future of Mapping. CloudMade are now offering commercially supported APIs on top of OpenStreetMap, including geocoding, routing and tile access libraries in Python/Ruby/Java and a very neat theming tool that lets you design your own map styles. This is really going to kick innovation around OpenStreetMap up a notch. # 17th February 2009, 11:25 am

Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. As an ex-Yahoo! this is really exciting—WhereOnEarth (a London company acquired by Yahoo! in 2005) provide the incredibly detailed geographical data used by Flickr, Upcoming and FireEagle—and now it’s available as an external API. # 12th May 2008, 9:02 pm

Flickr Place IDs. flickr.places.find, flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL and flickr.places.resolvePlaceID combine to provide a really useful, lightweight not-quite-a-geocoder API. It’s a shame you can’t search for places by providing a latitude/longitude point yet. # 19th January 2008, 7:34 am

Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery. My contribution to 24 ways: using Mapstraction to geocode hCards (extracted with jQuery) and plot them on a Google Map. # 12th December 2007, 12:28 am

The New Upcoming. No more metros! Upcoming is now hooked in to Yahoo!’s WhereOnEarth data, meaning plenty of geocoded brilliance. # 20th April 2007, 12:13 am

Jeff Croft: Geocoding My Life. Really smart weblog integration of the Flickr API, using the Geocoder.us reverse geocoder along with hand entered locations to create a browseable archive of photos by location. # 1st February 2007, 1:27 pm