unclear, but we'll definitely message out to the list as we make more of our
datasets available.
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 10:15 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
<zn...@cesmail.net>wrote:
> Awesome! That is a big step forward! How soon do you think this will be
> rolled out to a couple of obvious places - Haiti and Chile? I've got a lot
> of friends in the disaster response and the mapping communities that are
> working hard to map places via mobiles, and there are as a result huge and
> free as in freedom databases you can access.
> --
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
> borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky/
>
> "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul
> Erd?s
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting Raffi Krikorian <ra...@twitter.com>:
>
> hi all.
>>
>> i wanted to give you all a heads up on some big changes we're making to
>> our
>> geo-tagging API. right now, you can post a status update along with a
>> latitude and longitude pair -- what we've jokingly referred to as
>> "geo-tweeting", is actually just a status update with a "where" in the
>> form
>> of a coordinate attached to it. we're about to add a whole new layer of
>> context to that status update.
>>
>> our goal is to provide a few more options to API developers (and the users
>> they are servicing) through this contextual information. people, we find,
>> inherently want to talk about a "place". a place, for a lot of people,
>> has
>> a name and is not a latitude and longitude pair. (37.78215, -122.40060),
>> for example, doesn't mean a lot to a lot of people -- but, "San Francisco,
>> CA, USA" does. we're also trying to help users who aren't comfortable
>> annotating their tweets with their exact coordinates, but, instead, are
>> really happy to say what city, or even neighborhood, they are in.
>> annotating your place with a name does that too.
>>
>> once our new additions to our geo infrastructure comes into place,
>> geo-tweets will get richer data. for example, a status object may look
>> like
>> the following (abbreviated):
>>
>> {
>> "id":9505317221,
>> ...
>> "coordinates": {
>> "type":"Point",
>> "coordinates": [-122.40060, 37.78215]
>> },
>> "place": {
>> "country":"United States",
>> "country_code":"US",
>> "full_name":"SoMa, San Francisco",
>> "name":"SoMa",
>> "place_type":"neighborhood",
>> "bounding_box": {
>> "type":"Polygon",
>> "coordinates": [
>> [
>> [ -122.42284884, 37.76893497 ],
>> [ -122.3964, 37.76893497 ],
>> [ -122.3964, 37.78752897 ],
>> [ -122.42284884, 37.78752897 ]
>> ]
>> ]
>> },
>> "id":"7695dd2ec2f86f2b",
>> "url":"/1/geo/id/7695dd2ec2f86f2b.json"
>> },
>> ...
>> "text":"Wherever you go, there you are."
>> }
>>
>> here you'll see a new place attribute that gives the contextual location
>> of
>> the geo-tweet itself. in these cases, you'll have rich, and
>> human-readable,
>> information about where this tweet has come from -- in this case, SoMa,
>> San
>> Francisco. the geo object, for the time being, is still there, so you
>> don't
>> have to worry about backwards compatibility. it will soon be deprecated,
>> however and please plan for that. we're also introducing a
>> coordinatesobject which has the added bonus that, when in JSON, it is
>>
>> properly GeoJSON
>> encoded with the longitude before latitude.
>>
>> to support this these changes we've added a few endpoints:
>>
>>
>> https://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-GET-geo-reverse_geocode
>> https://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-GET-geo-ID
>>
>> you can call geo/reverse_geocode with a latitude and longitude, and it
>> will
>> return an array of places that you can use to annotate your tweet with.
>> each place that is returned will have a unique ID that you can use, as
>> well
>> as a displayable name, and even a geographical bounding box that you can
>> use
>> for display on a map. if you want more details, then hit the
>> geo/idendpoint where, if available, and if you're interested, you can
>>
>> retrieve a
>> more detailed geometry for more accurate map drawing. we've also updated
>> the statuses/update documentation (
>>
>> https://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses%C2%A0update
>> )
>> to indicate how to pass that place ID with your status update.
>>
>> for this first pass, we're only going live with United States-centric
>> data,
>> but that will quickly be expanded geographically as we work out the kinks
>> in
>> our system. there are definitely some nuances that i'm missing in this
>> e-mail, a few things are still in flux, but we're rapidly documenting this
>> on our wiki, and we hope to be going live with it quite soon. as always,
>> if
>> you have any questions, just find us at @twitterapi, or drop us an e-mail.
>>
>> --
>> Raffi Krikorian
>> Twitter Platform Team
>> http://twitter.com/raffi
>>
>>
>
--
Raffi Krikorian
Twitter Platform Team
http://twitter.com/raffi
