Just saw this on Ajaxian - perfect timing! http://ajaxian.com/archives/geomaker-geo-locations-as-microformats-or-a-map-from-texts-or-urls
Essentially, Placemaker (from Yahoo!) is a webservice that does exactly what's needed for Ubiquity's location noun - parses unstructured text, and matches it against structured location data. - Blair On 30/06/09 9:58 AM, Blair McBride wrote: > WUnderground seems the best freely available service that provides > world-wide coverage (someone please find a better one to prove me > wrong!). So yes, to do better would require using locale-specific > services. Which of course means its harder to implement & maintain, but > the user experience should improve drastically. Would still need to use > WUnderground as a fallback though - for locations without a > locale-specific service. So really, that's just hiding the problem from > certain people. > > Another alternative is to use a seperate geocoding service. Send the > user's input to the geocoder, which returns its parse of the input, then > we send that to WUnderground in a standardized format. The location noun > could really do with that ability anyway, regardless of whether its used > in this specific case. > > - Blair > > > > > On 30/06/09 6:20 AM, Jono DiCarlo wrote: >> >> Could we solve the problem by switching to a different weather >> service? There's no particular reason we have to stay with Weather >> Underground. I'm not real familiar with the alternatives, but maybe >> one of them will do a better locale-independent parsing job? >> --Jono >> >> On Jun 29, 7:47 am, satyr<[email protected]> wrote: >>> http://gist.github.com/90316 >>> >>> Attempted to fix the query problem by allowing the user to set the >>> default location. >>> >>> On Jun 20, 2:16 am, Heather<[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> What it comes down to is that within the United States, Wunderground >>>> really only reliably returns a match for a "city, state" combination. >>>> "city, state, united states" doesn't work well, nor does "city, united >>>> states". It doesn't matter if you use commas or not - as soon as you >>>> add "united states" to your query, wunderground chokes. >> >> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ubiquity-firefox" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-firefox?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
