Announcing Yahoo Placemaker - Geo-enrich Your Content

I know this is hacker news and all, but it's annoying when a neat-looking new api is released like this and the documentation doesn't have any obvious cut-and-paste examples of Get calls to play around with. They offer up two examples, but the "examples" don't resemble anything that I can play with or take action with, I see two code snippets and not much in the way of explanation.

I find enough APIs like this that I have a text file with sample api calls for different services that I get out when I go to play around with them as I can't find cut-and-paste examples of their calls in their documentation.

If anyone can steer me to a URL I can try out (I have an api key), I'd be appreciative. It's just not clear to me, as a somewhat novice developer how to use this service without a blunt example.

Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.

Placemaker provides geo-enrichment for the hugely significant proportion of Web content that is geographically relevant but not geographically discoverable. Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found. The WOEIDs returned by the service can be passed to Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet™ API for further geographic enrichment and discovery.

Placemaker is not a geocoder and does not perform street-level address recognition; it is however a geo-extraction and indexing tool designed to help determine the 'whereness' of a document or atomic unit of text. It provides the geographic developer community with the means to mark-up and index their content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner, and assists with geographic discovery and aggregation across the Internet.

I was impressed by this api from Yahoo a lot. It worked really well. I'd already written my own but this works super fast and reliably. I just need more control over disambiguation.

Here's some other info though: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/05/20/yahoo-releases-pl...