Because I don’t think this announcement got sufficient attention: Twitter is using Yahoo’s WOEIDs to identify locations in its Geolocation API.
WOEIDs are:
- a numeric identifier for geographical places or regions, from a “place of interest” all the way up to continent
- uniquely defined, for each place
- hierarchically nested
- related to each other by natural concepts, such as neighbor-of, sibling-of, etc.
- managed, by Yahoo
- a language independent way of talking about place
- not necessarily tied to political boundaries, i.e. there’s a WOEID for the Bay Area
This announcement is important because:
- it orders tweets into “containers” that can be used to find those tweets easily. In particular, there’s now codes that a machine can easily work with to find human concepts. Previous attempts at identification depended upon things such user entered hash tags for things such as a nearby airport, postal code, zip code, etc. and other concepts that don’t necessarily reflect what’s really going on
- it encourages others to start building on WOEIDs, a non-Google way of identifying places
Read more:
- Yahoo GeoPlanet Annoucement
- Twitter’s Annoucement
- TechCrunch
- Yahoo Technical Stuff anout WOEIDs (+ APIs, etc. here)
Note that I have some concerns about how well WOEIDs will work when we start wanting them being dynamically/crowd defined down to the business level (e.g. sort of like what foursquare is doing; I don’t think they use WOEIDs though.)
Thanks for the post David; we think this is a significant announcement on the part of Twitter and we’re really happy to see any and all uses of WOEIDs. When it comes to “dynamically/crowd defined” WOEIDs … that needs a publicly accessible way to create and manage WOEIDs. We don’t have such an API platform … yet. But watch out for announcements on this towards the middle of next year.
The WOEIDs for everything is certainly tying into a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently, especially with regards to OpenData and cities. It would be nice if there was a standard way that cities (etc) could grab a million WOEIDs and define them in a standard way for property lines, municipal areas, etc. so now everyone has a common vocabulary/IDs for talking about places. Sort of a Google Transit-like idea, but for identifying places in cities. Then of course we have to consider issues such as what’s the relationship of a business to it’s property lines, businesses opening and closing, and so forth. Or am I reading to much into this?