Turn Web composition Into A Map With GeoMaker

July 3, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News

At the end of last May, Yahoo released an experimental version of Placemaker, a “geo-enrichment” platform. What it does is help developers assemble applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic composition (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 composition and is capable of putting the aggregate documents 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 subject matter geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner (and Geo Microformats-compatible, too). But the process of parsing the documents could certain have been made a lot easier, and whether you weren’t a developer there wasn’t really any use for the tool at all.

Enter GeoMaker, a fresh project by the hands of Yahoo developer Chris Heilmann that aims to form the whole process more user-friendly. Now it just takes three easy steps to copy-paste substance either by directly entering info or by fetching it from

a Web address and create a map based on the places the underlying software can identify. It even comes with its proper API.

To see it in action, jump to this non-embeddable Flickr video that shows you how it works.

To analysis it, I entered the URL for a post I wrote yesterday about the obvious geographical differences in terms of level of engagement with social networking services. I don’t have access to a free map developer key, or I would have been able to replace the YMAPPID in the embed cipher with the key and embed the map, but here’s a screenshot of how it came out:

I can see a couple of uses for that, but it’s worth noting Christian is asking for feedback at that stage, which he intends to use to refine and improve GeoMaker prior to making it available as an open-source project on GitHub.

(Hat tip to Programmable Web)

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