The Geo group hangs out here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ysearchboss/

Try asking this in there and you'll get a faster answer :)

Robyn

Hi,
I just started using Placemaker, and although I am finding it very useful and precise, there seems to be quite a lack of places provided by Placemaker for Malta, and only major towns are available. Are there any future plans to increase the coverage for countries such as Malta?

Bit of a significant one - a search for "England" yields no results.

QUOTE (Eddie B @ 5 Jun 2009 10:41 AM) Have you noticed that Placemaker doesn't recognize your neighborhood, or favorite tourist attraction? Would you like to see these places added to a future release of Placemaker? If so, you may suggest places to be added by posting a reply on the GeoPlanet Enhancements Requests Missing and new places topic. All suggestions will be reviewed for inclusion in our named place repository that is used by both Placemaker and GeoPlanet.

What we are looking for is source material that describes the place mentioned. For each place we need to know the following information:

Place name (e.g. Chinatown)
Place type (e.g. Neighborhood)
Location (coordinates or containing place)
URL that mentions the place name in context (optional)

If you know of a source that contains multiple places, you don't need to provide information about every place; the URL will be sufficient.

Hello,
I am creating an application that retrieves places from news articles using PlaceMaker. For the most part it works great, but the most common errors in identifying places deals with place names that use common words or phrases. For example:

Pine Bark, Waleska, GA, US
Lofty Heights, MD, US
German, NY, US
Basket Case, St. Augustine, FL, US
Greenhouse, Plant City, FL, US
Main Point, Newfoundland and Labrador, CA

The term "Chicago" only refers to a place, but the term "Main Point" could also be part of a discussion that has nothing to do with any place. I'm wondering if these types of place names could be identified and given a lower confidence because they could easilty be confused, especially if they are not a highly populated place? For now, I build a list of these places as I find them in the results and filter them from all future results. There are many more like this and it seems like they are never ending. I would be happy to send you my complete list. It is a work in progress.
Thanks,
Ken

I'm getting responses from placemaker containing woeid's that aren't found in the geoplanet data csv OR the geoplanet API.

For example, I get this place in a placemaker response:
woeid: 56257192
name: Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, US
lat: 42.377700
lon: -71.120100

A query to the geoplanet API: http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/56257192?appid=foobar
returns: 404 Resource Does Not Exist

I've seen several other woeid's like this. They aren't in the changes list so they don't appear to be deprectated or have been deleted. I was under the assumption that Placemaker used the geoplanet data but it seems they aren't quite in sync.

Dear Yahoo,

May be you will look into the following place names:

- Earth / Europe / Netherlands / Zeeland / Veere / Vere

> last part must (also) be: Veere

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veere

and:

- Earth / Europe / Belgium / Oost-Vlaanderen / Eeklo / Selzaet
- Earth / Europe / Belgium / Oost-Vlaanderen / Eeklo / Selzaet / Klein Rusland
- Earth / Europe / Belgium / Oost-Vlaanderen / Eeklo / Selzaet / Molenstukken

> Selzaet = Zelzate, as in:

Earth / Europe / Belgium / Oost-Vlaanderen / Eeklo / Zelzate

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelzate

Thank you!

Just checking in to see if there is any more movement on getting JSON as an output format for Placemaker. This would be a great enhancement!

Been collecting info on the Oil Spill from sources like Twitter and Flickr. Using Managing News with Placemaker on beakgeek.org and the results are sometimes frustrating. I am not a dev, just a user of your service. Before I go further - Nice Job! - the service is kicking ass with a few exceptions....

Example 1) Venice, LA is returned as Venice, Los Angeles or sometimes Venice, Italy. Now, 99.9xx% of the time Venice, LA will not be in the national news. But it has been trending for a few days. Would be nice if your service could add a bit of weight to current trends location wise. If I don't put Venice Beach or some other context for the district in the text should it really weigh higher than a city in Louisiana?

Example 2) Deepwater Horizon returns as Deepwater, NJ - Another example of a trend. Is Deepwater Horizon a place? No but it's a POI now. It's not going to move as its on the sea floor and will be an important place in US history. Deepwater by itself can be NJ but if there is Deepwater Horizon in the text the POI should be returned.

Thanks,
Coby

I do not agree that it will make it more consistent, as the country code is uses to disambiguate a place name. When the place name is "United States" adding "US" does not help in disambiguation.

Dear Geo developpers,

I really like your Placemaker service! I hope I can help a bit by suggesting some minor adjustments which imho would enhance it's usability a bit:
In particular I would suggest to make the format of the name Element (the child of placeDetails->place) a bit more consistent.
For example for woeid: 2403079 the format is: which includes the country code as last two letter code of that string - which is very good. In contrast (sorry for the trivial example) for woeid: 23424977 the same element contains .
Instead I would suggest to change the CDATA to
I know it is indicated in the XML that 'United States' is of type 'country'. But if I need to find out the appropriate country code (US), I would need to look up the woid XML to find that out ...

BTW. is it possible to look up more than one woid e.g. by using something similar like http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/[woid1|woid2|woid3] ?

best regards,
Robert

Thanks for your feedback, we will try to correct some of these issues.


1. "Drachten is a village in the Netherlands"
When we "merge" two locations we take the number of words between them into account.
Contrast with "Drachten in the Netherlands" - here we return the merged result.
We will, however look into why we omit a separate "Drachten" result in your first query.

2. "University of York" and "Athene"
-Our statistical evidence suggested that these terms on their own are not significant enough to be a location. They only "merge" when you pass in a disambiguating location next to it. We will look into this.

3. "Georgia"
- our statistical evidence gathered indicate that it is mostly used as the US state.

4. 'Schoorl, Netherlands'
-Yes, same reason as in 2. above. We will look into it.

5. "Nederland Nederland"
-Don't remove lower case entities. You are effectively throwing away evidence, so we find a town called Netherlands in the country Netherlands. What would happen in a made up example: "New clothes sale York" -> you transfor this to "New York" which is what we will match against.

6. "Nieuw Zeeland"
-I don't agree: "Nieuw Zeeland" certainly seems a better match than "Zeeland". Autodisambiguate only has disambiguates between places with the same name (in this case only 1, "country"). This happens after we recognised the location part "Nieuw Zeeland".


Thanks,
Walter

Sorry I just read the last line of the Welcome message and I didn't post all things in seperate items. Will make new ones next time

Another one:

"Nieuw Zeeland" (New Zealand) is not recognized in a full text, but "Zeeland" is also a province in the Netherlands, so it should be able to match one of these places. With autoDisambiguate=false and the text "Nieuw Zeeland" it only finds the country and not the province.

I think I can find a lot more ;)

By removing all lower case words from the text it sometimes happens that "Nederland Nederland" is in the text. This is just a repetition of the country name, but Placemaker thinks this is a province in the Netherlands called Overijssel.

{confidence:8, weight:1, woeId:731866, name:Nederland, Overijssel, NL, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:52.7558, longitude:5.96283}}

It only does this if Netherlands is in Dutch, works correctly in English.

'Schoorl' is not recognized, but 'Schoorl, Netherlands' is. Like Athens there is no other place named like this. So for some reason it is filtering these results

And also it prefers US places above countries, "Georgia is a country"

{confidence:6, weight:1, woeId:2347569, name:Georgia, US, matchType:0, type:State, centroid:{latitude:32.6783, longitude:-83.223}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409711, name:Georgia, IN, US, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:38.7121, longitude:-86.5839}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409712, name:Georgia, KS, US, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:37.6303, longitude:-98.009}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409713, name:Georgia, LA, US, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:29.8403, longitude:-90.9883}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409714, name:Georgia, NJ, US, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:40.1862, longitude:-74.2858}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409715, name:Georgia, TX, US, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:33.7606, longitude:-95.8281}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409716, name:Georgia, Hartselle, AL, US, matchType:0, type:Suburb, centroid:{latitude:34.4533, longitude:-86.9301}},
{confidence:1, weight:1, woeId:2409718, name:Georgia, VT, US, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:44.7271, longitude:-73.118}},
{confidence:2, weight:1, woeId:23424823, name:Georgia, matchType:0, type:Country, centroid:{latitude:42.3115, longitude:43.3658}}

For enhancing newspaper articles I'm seeing some behaviour of the API that can be improved by some input adjustments.

Normally I would send an entire news article to Yahoo (+- 1000 words), but with the following text enhancements it improves the results:

1. News articles write placenames with a capital letter. Like 'New York' and not 'new york'.
Testing with the following sentence: "Drachten is a village in the Netherlands" without any optimization:

{confidence:9, weight:1, woeId:23424909, name:Netherlands, matchType:0, type:Country, centroid:{latitude:52.1082, longitude:5.32986}}

{confidence:10, weight:1, woeId:728824, name:Drachten, Friesland, NL, matchType:0, type:Town, centroid:{latitude:53.1029, longitude:6.09856}}

{confidence:9, weight:1, woeId:23702141, name:University of York, Heslington, England, GB, matchType:0, type:POI, centroid:{latitude:53.9459, longitude:-1.04607}}

The weight is a relative measure of how important the piece of text where the location was found within the document as a whole.

For example, locations found in the documentTitle, title elements in RSS and headings in HTML will be more important and will have weight > 1.

I don't seem to be getting any value other than 1 for the weight element on any placeDetails. Is anyone else seeing other values?

sure thanks.

Well, I need to know why I can't get an API Key for PlaceMaker...Everytime I try, it ask me for my password over and over again.
It never does anything besides bring me pack to the page to enter my password... I would really like to start using this API ASAP.
I've tried on different browsers and different days.