Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.
Placemaker provides geo-enrichment for the hugely significant proportion of Web content that is geographically relevant but not geographically discoverable. Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found. The WOEIDs returned by the service can be passed to Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet™ API for further geographic enrichment and discovery.