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geoweb

GIS exec works to unlock hidden geographic data

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Geography buffs tantalized by the quantity of geographic information hidden away among countless municipal computer systems have something to cheer about.

The new version 9.3 of the dominant geographic information system (GIS) software, sold by a company called ESRI, now makes it a relatively simple matter to expose that data for easy consumption over the Internet.

"We are engineering it so it plugs in. It becomes effectively a support mechanism to the geoweb," said ESRI founder and Chief Executive Jack Dangermond, announcing the change at the Where 2.0 conference here.

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Yahoo offers geographic data to Web sites

Yahoo is letting outside Web sites use information from its own catalog of geographic information, thus allowing programmers to employ the Yahoo data and services into their own applications.

The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging buff at Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. The catalog gives locations a numeric identifier--where on Earth IDs, or WOEIDs, to various locations.

"Yahoo have opened up their geo database," Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example: the Sydney Opera House has the WOEID of 28717584.

The service is part of what … Read more