GeoNames Forum

Are there plans to have reverse geocoding working for Canada?

GeoNames has a lot of reverse geocoding web services for the whole world including Canada.

What is missing so far is street level (address, intersection, ...) reverse geocoding. Mainly for lack of data. The so called "National Road Network" data is freely available from GeoBase.ca: http://www.geobase.ca/geobase/en/data/nrn/description.html
Would a reverse geocoding based on the "National Road Network" dataset cover your needs?

Marc

Not sure why this thread didn't go anywhere, but I am currently researching resources for a project that will require street-level reverse-geocoding for the USA and Canada. I think postcode might be good enough initially as long as I can derive Province name, but eventually I will need to be able to get city/village and closest road.

I am just getting started with the project and don't know enough to be able to answer the question about the suitability of the GeoBase dataset for the application.

From the current state of free reverse-geocoding services available on the GeoNames site it appears that nobody has seen fit to re-code the GeoBase data. What kind of effort would be required?

Thanks.

I also want to do this. API works for US addresses but not for Canadian ones...

Would a reverse geocoding based on the "National Road Network" dataset cover your needs?

Yes, it would. Thanks

Any timeline for this?

There is no timeline for this. It is somewhere on the todo/nice-to-have list. I would say it depends on how much interest it raises. At the moment it seems that not any users are asking for it.

Best

Marc

>GeoNames has a lot of reverse geocoding web services for the whole world including Canada.

Thanks for the reply.

So, if it won't take a long/lat/alt combination and return a street intersection, what specific information can it return from that combination?

I note that Qik render very accurate street intersection information: I guess they must be paying for it.

Thanks, M.

mrjcleaver wrote:

So, if it won't take a long/lat/alt combination and return a street intersection, what specific information can it return from that combination?

The available reverse geocoding services are listed here:
http://www.geonames.org/export/reverse-geocoding.html

Best

Marc