Yahoo’s Internet Location Platform

Yahoo’s announcement of its Internet Location Platform will be of great interest to web developers and programmers interested in geolocating data, but completely abstruse to everyone else. The platform uses something called Where on Earth ID (WOEID), a numerical tag that is associated with a given location; it can be used to obtain geographic coordinates but also spatial relationships (e.g., a city is inside a country, has a postal code, is next to another city). Better (but more technical) explanations elsewhere: Dan Catt’s is the one everyone is pointing to (for good reason); see also James Fee, Ed Parsons, All Points Blog and CNet for how it works and/or what it all means.

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