[glue-wg] More on location: WOEID

[Paul Millar]

Hi all,

There's an interesting audio interview with Tyler Bell on O'Reilly Radar about 
how to specify geographical location.  In the interview, Tyler talks about 
Yahoo's approach:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/where-20-preview---tyler-bell.html

In brief, they define a unique 32-bit number to each location: the "Where On 
Earth ID" or "WOEID".  They also provide a public, restful API to query their 
database to extract metadata about the area.  Details are available here:

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/guide/

One of the nice features of this is one can express low-granularity 
information (such as a city, county or country) without having to specify a 
(potentially meaningless) centroid lat./long. ordered pair.  This is nice as 
they also expose their semantic structure, so one can (for example) discover 
that Canada is within the United States.

I propose in the next version of GLUE we add an optional field called woeid so 
people have a standard field to include the WOEID, if they choose to do so.

Cheers,

Paul.