Simon Willison’s Weblog

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 / geocoders, geocoding, geonames, github, google, jacob-kaplan-moss, placemaker, projects, python, web-services, yahoo

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 / christian-heilmann, geocoding, geospatial, javascript, jsonp, nlp, placemaker, yahoo, yql, yqlexecute

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 / geo, geocoding, gis, placemaker, yahoo