YQL Geo Library - get all your geo needs in JavaScript - geolocation, reverse geocoding, content analysis

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As an aid for the Georgia Tech Hack 2010 and as a follow-up to my talk about geolocation here is a simple JavaScript library that answers most of your geo questions. It wraps the following services in a simple interface:

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Usage

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To use the geo library, simply include it in your document. There is one simple method to use which is:

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yqlgeo.get(what,callback)

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what: is the thing you want to analyse - this could be the URL to a web document, a text, an IP, a pair of latitude and longitude information or "visitor" to detect the geographic location of the current visitor.
callback: is the callback method that will be called when there was a succesful retrieval of information. The data comes back as an object - if there was an error retrieving the information the data will be wrapped in an error property.

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Check out the different use cases of the library below:

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Getting the geographical location from a text

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You can send an arbitrary text to the get() method to find the geographical information in it:

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yqlgeo.get('paris,fr',function(o){
 53 |   alert(o.place.name+' ('+
 54 |     o.place.centroid.latitude+','+
 55 |     o.place.centroid.longitude+
 56 |   ')');
 57 | })

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Getting the location information from lat/lon

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You can get all kind of data from a latitude and longitude pair. You can either send them in as two parameters or as an array:

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yqlgeo.get(33.748,-84.393,function(o){
 65 |   alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content);
 66 | })

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yqlgeo.get([33.748,-84.393],function(o){
 70 |   alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content);
 71 | })

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Get all the geo locations from a certain URL

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You can scrape a certain document at a URL for geographical locations:

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yqlgeo.get('http://icant.co.uk',function(o){
 79 |   var out = '';
 80 |   var all = o.place.length;
 81 |   for(var i=0;i<all;i++){
 82 |     out+=o.place[i].name+'\n';
 83 |   };
 84 |   alert(out);
 85 | });

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Get the place from an IP number

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yqlgeo.get('217.12.14.240',function(o){
 91 |   alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content +  
 92 |         ' (' + o.place.centroid.latitude + ',' +
 93 |                o.place.centroid.longitude + ')'
 94 |         );
 95 | });
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Find the user (using the W3C geolocation API and IP as a fallback)

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yqlgeo.get('visitor',function(o){
102 |   if(o.error){
103 |     alert('No location found for user :('); // some IPs are not in the DB :(
104 |   } else {
105 |     alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content +  
106 |           ' (' + o.place.centroid.latitude + ',' +
107 |                  o.place.centroid.longitude + ')'
108 |           );
109 |   }
110 | });
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Download the library

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You can get the library directly from here by saving this link or by getting the source code from GitHub.

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