PUBLIC MARKS with tags data & google

I'm not the first person to make this point, but there is an important lesson that I hope we take from this relatively minor tragedy: The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make.

A company spokesperson told me that the search giant is not looking at public phone directories to match phone numbers with user names. But it is looking through social media sites to correlate those accounts to your Google user name and profile.

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that any data that you create in (or import into) a product is your own. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products.

Yahoo! has released their WOEID names/relationship database as CC-

BY-3.0:

http://www.ygeoblog.com/2009/05/announcing-geoplanet-data/

The GeoPlanet Data does not contain any coordinate information, though

Flickr has also released a set of shapefiles as CC0, derived from WOEID

lat/lon geotagged photos:

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/05/21/flickr-shapefiles-public-datas...

This seems of interest to GeoNames. It could be cool to have a mapping

of GNIS identifiers to WOEIDs. Would that be within the mission of

GeoNames?

Structured data makes the web a better place. It also helps Google better understand and present your page in search results.