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Items tagged gis in May, 2009

Filters: Year: 2009 × Month: May × gis × Sorted by date


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

Yahoo! Geo: Announcing GeoPlanet Data. The Yahoo! WhereOnEarth geographic data set is fantastic, but I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about building applications against it in case the API went away. That’s not an issue any more—the entire dataset is now available to download and use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It’s not entirely clear what the attribution requirements are—do you have to put “data from GeoPlanet” on every page or can you get away with just tucking the attribution away in an “about this site” page? UPDATE: The data doesn’t include latitude/longitude or bounding boxes, which severely reduces its utility. # 20th May 2009, 9:12 pm

Google Maps Data API (via) I’m disappointed by this one—it’s really just a CRUD store for the KML files used in Google MyMaps. It would be a lot more useful if it let you perform geospatial calculations against your stored map data using some kind of query API—a cloud service alternative to tools like PostGIS. # 20th May 2009, 9:07 pm