Now, Yahoo's announcing that their GeoPlanet data is being made available to the public via a Creative Commons license, and in the form of Placemaker, a new Web service released at Where2.0 today that essentially lets any developer add geo-data to their application. With Placemaker, anyone can tack on an extra layer of geo-intelligence to create an LBS of their own.
Placemaker's geo-enrichment service, which competes with Google's Geolocation API, is for application developers who want to add local relevance to their web sites and applications. The free geoparsing service is driven by Yahoo's GeoPlanet API and is actually able to identify physical places from unstructured content in text form.
According to Yahoo's Placemaker description, the service handles free-from text and "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 ... 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."
So what we're talking about with Placemaker is a lot more than your location on a map, but also time and place recognition as a resource that developers can use to decipher and create context around that location for their own applications. We think this could add instant value to a number of our favorite sites.