Administrative level and coordinates from Yahoo GeoPlanet WOEID

Question

The Yahoo GeoPlanet data can be freely downloaded from:

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/data/.

If I understand it correctly, each WOEID corresponds to a unique location on earth, with associated hierarchy indicators (continent, country, state, etc.). The complementary GeoPlanet Explorer site allows you to search by location name, and provides a nice hierarchy of parent, siblings and children. For example, this link provides an overview for the "Boudh" district in the state of Orissa in India, this link lists all its siblings, and this all the towns in the district. For every location (parent, siblings, children), the site queries and returns hierarchy (country, state, district, town) and coordinates (lat/long).

My question is that is possible to get the same information by running bulk queries on the WOEIDs in the GeoPlanet data, rather than using the explorer website and querying by name and then drilling down?

Answer 1

Yes, the downloads provide this ability. The 'only' thing missing from the download is centroid coordinate data, and the part-of relationships that lie outside the formal hierarchy.

Consider Factual's World Geographies http://developer.factual.com/data-docs/#world-geographies as an alternative that contains centroids.