Paris, Paris (Texas) or Paris Hilton? Placemaker to the Rescue!

The good news? All of your content contains location data.
The bad news? It's almost certainly unstructured, hidden away in free-form text.

In this session we'll show you how the Placemaker module enables you to make your your site's content location-aware. Placemaker uses Yahoo!'s Geo Technologies APIs to parse, identify and index the geographic data buried within the unstructured text of your nodes. Placemaker can extract location specific terms such as 'Paris' whilst ignoring similar but likely non-geographical terms such as 'Paris Hilton', and even tries to determine whether the content appears to refer to Paris, France or Paris, Texas.

Having geo-enriched your content we'll show you how you can display it on map, or do simple proximity searching. Then we'll really push the geo-boat out and (with a little help from the faceted search engine Apache Solr) show you how to find related content based on the spatial relationships between nodes - eg how a search for Paris could lead users towards other content also referencing Paris, other French cities, or other European capitals.

You'll hopefully come away from this session enthused by the idea of geo-enriching your content and exploring it using spatial relationships.