WOEID

A WOEID (Where On Earth IDentifier) is a unique 32-bit reference identifier, originally defined by GeoPlanet and now assigned by Yahoo!, that identifies any feature on Earth.^[1] In 2009, Yahoo! released GeoPlanet's WOEID data to the public,^[2] with the last release on 1 June 2012, after which Yahoo! decided to cease making the data downloadable until they "determine a better way to surface the data as a part of the service".^[3]

WOEIDs are used by a number of other projects, including Flickr,^[4] OpenStreetMap,^[5] Twitter,^[6] WOEID Search Engine (archive link) and Nations24.

A successor to the WOEID project is Who's On First.

WOEID of some popular locations on Earth

From WOEID Search Engine:^[7]

• 4118 - Toronto
• 44418 - London
• 615702 - Paris
• 2295019 - New Delhi
• 2295380 - Varanasi
• 2442047 - Los Angeles
• 2459115 - New York
• 2487956 - San Francisco
• 23424851 - Iran
• 29128560 - Kaithi

Example

E.g. Berlin does not know about Germany, which itself doesn't know about Europe and so forth.^{[clarification needed]} GeoPlanet records, or places as they are called by Yahoo!, always (except one) have a reference to its parent place and therefore offer relations between places like the following:^[8]

• Parent (direct surrounding place)
• Child (direct sub-places)
• Siblings (places sharing the same parent and place type)
• Ancestors (set of all parents)

If you take e.g. our company's district you will get the following family tree:

• Deutschland (WOEID 23424829)
  • Bundesland Berlin (WOEID 2345496)
    • Stadtkreis Berlin (WOEID 1259838)
      • Berlin (WOEID 638242)
        • Ortsteil Pankow (WOEID 26821868)
        • Ortsteil Prenzlauer Berg (WOEID 26821872)
        • Ortsteil Wedding (WOEID 26821851)
      • Suan Luang (WOEID 12756344)
        • ...

See also

• Discrete Global Grid
• List of geocoding systems

References

1. "Yahoo! WOEID Lookup". Zourbuth Project.
2. "Free geo data solutions compared: GeoNames.org vs. Yahoo! GeoPlanet". Cosmo Code. 24 January 2010.
3. "Yahoo! GeoPlanet™ Data". Yahoo!. Archived from the original on 22 August 2014. Retrieved 25 June 2014.
4. "Flickr Services: Flickr API: flickr.places.getInfo". www.flickr.com. Retrieved 2016-05-01.
5. "Key:woeid - OpenStreetMap Wiki". wiki.openstreetmap.org. Retrieved 2016-05-01.
6. "Twitter Developer Documentation". developer.twitter.com. Retrieved 2019-01-08.
7. "WOEID Search Engine (archive link)" originally findmycity.com
8. "Free geo data solutions compared: GeoNames.org vs. Yahoo! GeoPlanet - CosmoCode GmbH". www.cosmocode.de. Archived from the original on 2010-01-27.