Tuesday, February 23, 2010

OpenCalais and Google Maps - Updated

Warwickshire News Mine

This Google Maps mashup geo-tags news stories from the Warwickshire County Council (UK) website.

The site uses OpenCalais to tag news from the council website. Those tags that it finds that are place names are then shown on the Google Map. If you click on any of the map markers an information window opens displaying the relevant news story.

OpenCalais uses natural language processing and other methods to produce tags for any website. It then finds 'entities' within the tags such as people's names, events and, most importantly for mappers, geographical place names.

It does sound like a great tool to use with the Google Maps API.

Transmission News

Transmission News is another Google Maps mashup that uses OpenCalais to present the news on a map. The site presents news from CBC, the BBC, Reuters and CNN.

It is possible to view all news services on the map at one time or select between each one. The news seems to be very current, so this looks to be a great site to keep up-to-date with breaking news.

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2 comments:

Josef Šlerka said...

It seems like my mashup based on Twitter Neww and OpenCalis: http://www.transnews.tw/

Keir Clarke said...

Thanks Josef. I've added your map to the post.