Getting Place Information | Adding Information | Development Platforms | Sample GeoAPI Queries | Getting Started | Staying In Touch | Documentation Change Log
Welcome to the GeoAPI Developers' Site
With Mixer Labs' GeoAPI you can quickly create location-based applications that let users both get and add information about places. For example:
- Reverse Geocoding: Translate latitude and longitude coordinates into places, such as a specific business, neighborhood, and/or city.
- Place Finder: You can either:
- Find places near lat/lon coordinates and filter them by type. For example, getting a list of restaurants within a quarter mile of your location.
- Or search for a place by name, then find out what neighborhood, city, and state it's in.
- Standardized Business Information: For a business at or within a given distance of a location, get its address, phone number, hours of operation, webpage url, and other information. Your application can then use this information to give its users the most relevant search results. For example, if a user searches for restaurants at 11:00 p.m., your application could show them only the ones that are still open.
- Canonical URLs: Each place (business, neighborhood, city, etc.) has a unique canonical url for reference/identification purposes, as well as a shortened url for use in tweets and such.
- Media Layers: Do geoqueries against Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Foursquare, Weatherbug, and other content sources. For example, you could show all Flickr photos taken within Dolores Park in San Francisco. Or all tweets made within a 100 yard radius of your current location.
- Write Information About Locations: Your application or its users can annotate and add additional information to businesses and locations. Only users of your application can read this information, and you can also make it available only to a subset of your users. For example, if your app runs a scavenger hunt, you could have a separate set of annotations for each different hunt.
- Entity (Place) Creation: Not only can you or your users annotate our database of 16 million businesses and points of interest, you can also create and annotate your own entities around the world. For example, you can create and annotate locations for nests of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands. Or create a virtual world overlay to Manhattan with your own blocks and neighborhoods. Or define neighborhoods for your college campus. Etc.
- Web: An HTML/HTTP/JSON based API for web applications.
- iPhone: An SDK for the iPhone's development platform.
- Ruby: A wrapper for Ruby applications.
Sample GeoAPI Queries [Top]
To get a feel for how GeoAPI works, here are some basic queries. Click on the query to see its JSON-formatted result. The appropriate doc page for each method describes the queries and results in more detail.
- Search from a latitude, longitude coordinate pair:
- Get the parent entities of a lat, lon pair:
- Get an entity's parents (in this case, the entity is Ritual Roasters in San Francisco, and its parents are the neighborhood and city it's located in):
- Get information about a business (in this case, Ritual Roasters in San Francisco):
- Get information about an entity (in this case, San Francisco):
There are also a number of full-fledged application demos, with source code available, on our Demos page.
Getting Started [Top]
To learn about GeoAPI's concepts and datatypes, and to get your own GeoAPI API key and start coding, go to our Getting Started With GeoAPI page. The Sidebar to your right on the screen contains the GeoAPI Documentation Table of Contents.
Staying In Touch [Top]
GeoAPI is a work in progress, so please check back regularly for updates and new features. Also, please help us improve GeoAPI by requesting features, telling us about any issues, contributing demo code, and, of course, building great applications!
- GeoAPI Blog: For news about GeoAPI, follow our blog.
- Twitter: We're also geoapi on Twitter.
- Requests/Bugs: Please post feature requests or bug reports on our Issues Page.
- Technical Questions: For general technical questions, please use GeoAPI.com's Google Group.
- Contact Us: Email us at "support at geoapi dot com".
Documentation Change Log [Top]
Any significant changes or additions to these GeoAPI docs will be noted here.
12-20-2009: Updated Listing View to include descriptions of new files listing all valid chain and verticals property values.
12-19-2009: Added page about the GeoAPI Ruby Wrapper.
