JS-Placemaker is a JavaScript wrapper for the Yahoo Placemaker web service using an YQL execute table to allow you to extract geo location information out of any text in various languages.

Examples

Simply click the "find locations" buttons in the following examples to see what geographical information Placemaker can find.

How to use JS-Placemaker

The first thing to do if you want to use JS-Placemaker is to get your own application ID for Placemaker.

Then all you need to do is include JSPlacemaker.js into your document and override the appID with yours.

Placemaker.config.appID = YOUR_APP_ID;
Placemaker.getPlaces(text,callback,locale); 

text

Freeform text to analyze

callback

function to call when the locations have been found

locale (optional)

locale of the text, f.e.'de-de' or 'fr-fr' or 'en-uk'

The callback function will get an object as the return value. If there weren't any locations found, this will have an error property, otherwise it has a match return value which is an object if there was only one result or an array when there were several. Each of these objects has a name, a type, a woeid and a centroid object which contains a latitude and a longitude.

For example the following call of JSPlacemaker returns in the object shown in the screenshot:

 
Placemaker.getPlaces('Hi I am Chris, I live in London. Originally I am from Germany',
function(o){
  console.log(o);
},
'en-uk'); 

If you define the locale you can also user other languages:

Placemaker.getPlaces('Hallo ich bin der Christian und komme aus 
Schweinfurt in Deutschland. Leben tu ich allerdings in England',
function(o){
  console.log(o);
},
'de-de');

Also works in French:

Placemaker.getPlaces('Bonjour, c\'est Christian. 
J\'habite en Londres en Angleterre, mais je suis Allemande',
function(o){
  console.log(o);
},'fr-fr'); 

That's it

Check the source of this page for the demo that makes the buttons above work. Happy geolocating!