GeoNames Forum

Hi all

I just want to announce that the first release of the (free and open source) gisgraphy framework is up !
You can see the fulltext and geoloc webservice here (for free) : http://services.gisgraphy.com/
Main Page : www.gisgraphy.com
Download page : http://www.gisgraphy.com/download/index.htm
Doc : http://www.gisgraphy.com/documentation
Opensearch module : http://www.gisgraphy.com/documentation/addons.htm#opensearch

Gisgraphy is a free and open source framework that provides fulltext search and find nearby services for Geonames data. It provides an importer to inject the data into a strongly typed Postgres / Postgis database and use them via 2 webservices or a java API : geolocalisation and fulltext in many format (XML, json, PHP, ruby, python, Atom, RSS / GeoRSS).

Here are the main functionalities :
* Importers from geonames CSV files. Just give the country(ies) you wish to import and / or the <a href="/placetype.htm">placetypes</a>, and Gisgraphy download the files and import them with all the alternateNames (optional), and sync the database with the fulltext search engine
* REST WebService
* Several output formats supported : XML, json, PHP, ruby, python, Atom, RSS / GeoRSS
Full text search (based on <a href="http://lucene.apache.org/java/"/>Lucene</a> / <a href="http://lucene.apache.org/solr/"/>Solr</a> with default filters optimized for city search
(case insensitivity, separator characters stripping, ..) via an Java API or a webservice
* Findnearby function (with limits, pagination, restrict to a specific country and/or language and other useful options) via a Java API or a Web Service
* An admin / back office whith statistics <a href="http://www.gisgraphy.com/screenshots.htm"> interface</a>
* Fully replicated / scalable / high performance / cached services
* Search for zipcode name, IATA, ICAO
* Internationalized (with support of cyrillique, arabic, chinese,... alphabet)
* Dojo widgets / prototype / Ajax to ease search but can be use it even if javascript is not enabled on the client side
* Opensearch module
* Plateform / language independent
* Provides all the countries flags in svg and png format
* ...

ps : The goal of gisgraphy is not to replace geonames WS, but to offer possibility to use geonames data in a free open source framework !