At the end of last May, Yahoo released an experimental version of Placemaker, a “geo-enrichment” platform. What it does is help developers make applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content (think RSS feeds, web pages, news, status updates etc.) and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup. In layman’s terms: it can detect places by scanning content and is capable of putting the aggregate data on a map.
While Placemaker does not serve as a geocoder and thus does not perform address recognition on street-level, it is perfectly capable of geo-extracting and indexing documents or atomic units of text, giving third-party developers the means to mark-up and index Web content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner (and Geo Microformats-compatible, too). But the process of parsing the data could sure have been made a lot easier, and if you weren’t a developer there wasn’t really any use for the tool at all.



























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