YQL Geo library – all your geo needs in pure JavaScript
I just finished doing some talks on geo hacking (slides are available here) and how to use some of the Geo technologies Yahoo and Google provide as part of a University gig in Atlanta.
As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting their head around them I thought it a good idea to build a small JavaScript library that does the job for them.
I give you the YQL Geo library (and its source on GitHub). Using this library you can do the following:
- Detecting the visitor’s location with the W3C geo API and with IP as a fallback
- Find geo location from text
- Find location from lat/lon pair
- Find locations in a certain web document (by URL)
- Get the location for a certain IP number
And all of that in pure JavaScript. For example:
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yqlgeo.get(
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‘paris,fr’,
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function(o){
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console.log(o);
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}
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)
Will get you:
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“place”:{
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“lang”:“en-US”,
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“uri”:“http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/615702″,
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“woeid”:“615702″,
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“placeTypeName”:{
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“code”:“7″,
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“content”:“Town”
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},
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“name”:“Paris”,
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“country”:{
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“code”:“FR”,
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“type”:“Country”,
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“content”:“France”
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},
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“admin1″:{
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“code”:“”,
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“type”:“Region”,
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“content”:“Ile-de-France”
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},
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“admin2″:{
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“code”:“FR-75″,
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“type”:“Department”,
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“content”:“Paris”
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},
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“admin3″:null,
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“locality1″:{
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“type”:“Town”,
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“content”:“Paris”
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},
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“locality2″:null,
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“postal”:null,
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“centroid”:{
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“latitude”:“48.856918″,
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“longitude”:“2.341210″
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},
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“boundingBox”:{
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“southWest”:{
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“latitude”:“48.658291″,
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“longitude”:“2.086790″
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},
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“northEast”:{
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“latitude”:“49.046940″,
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“longitude”:“2.637910″
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}
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}
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}
Other uses:
This gets the name and the country of a lat/lon pair:
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yqlgeo.get(33.748,-84.393,function(o){
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alert(o.place.name + ‘,’ + o.place.country.content);
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})
This finds the visitor’s location (on W3C geo API enabled browsers it asks them to share it – otherwise it detects the IP and locates this one on the planet)
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yqlgeo.get(‘visitor’,function(o){
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alert(o.place.name + ‘,’ + o.place.country.content +
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‘ (‘ + o.place.centroid.latitude + ‘,’ +
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o.place.centroid.longitude + ‘)’
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);
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});
Read all about it on my blog and enjoy!
