A WOEID (Where On Earth IDentifier) is a unique 32-bit reference identifier, originally defined by
GeoPlanet and now assigned by
Yahoo!
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
, that identifies any feature on Earth. In 2009, Yahoo! released GeoPlanet's WOEID data to the public,
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".
WOEIDs are used by a number of other projects, including
Flickr
Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...
,
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...
,
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
WOEID Search Engine (archive link)an
Nations24
A successor to the WOEID project i
Who's On First
WOEID of some popular locations on Earth
From WOEID Search Engine:
* 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. 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:
[ ]
* 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
{{reflist
Geographic object identifiers
Geocodes