Area of a given place

Since maps are being used for location based services, a zoom level plays a critical role. Having the surface area of a given location, or a zoom level, in the return string would make this possible. Place Types can be used for a general idea of this, but if geo planet decides to design place types such as islands, this again makes it hard to decide a zoom level. The place type, if a country, also imposes a problem when deducing a zoom level as there are countries of varying size. Thank you.

You're in luck. We just enhanced GeoPlanet with new resources, and two new elements to the long representation for place resources. The areaRank element gives you an indication of the size of a place, and the popRank element gives you an indication of the population of a place. These elements contain codes that correspond to a range of areas or residents. See http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/g...l#response-data for more details.

Eddie Babcock
Yahoo! Geo Technologies