Map APIs
By Akshay Java on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 10:03 am.Recently both Yahoo! and Google released their Map APIs. Both have interesting and unique features - while Google map is easy to customize and embed in your website or application, all you need to do with Yahoo Map API is provide it with the XML formatted data for
plotting information on the map. The nice thing about Yahoo API vs Google API is that you do not need to specify the exact latitude and longitude information and it does the geocoding for you using the address.
Having played with both a little, I hacked up an application that would extract the latest news from Yahoo! US News website and display on the map. You can view it in action here and it has also been added on the yahoo developer network’s featured application list here. 
These APIs provide a simple way for anyone to visualize geospatial information and I hope that such nifty applications would motivate people to provide metadata information such as OPML or geocoding in images.
Related posts: • Google social graph API; • Google Base launched!; • EZ Google maps for your web page;
Ebiquity Blog
July 27th, 2005 at 4:05 pm
Hi,
Nice work, however you need to check for (and escape) ampersands (and other characters, I’m assuming) in the XML news feed, e.g. I get the following error today 07/27/2005:
XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~aks1/yahoonews1.xml
Line Number 70, Column 29:Bausch & Lomb Profit Up on Contact Lenses
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