GeoNames Forum

Hi there,

I was wondering what happens when rss items have more than one possible location when they go through a service like the one below:

http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/worldNews

s the first match taken?

Might it be possible to report multiple location matches?

Many thanks in advance
CHEERS> SAM

Hi Sam

Disambiguation is quite tricky as the natural language processor does not really understand the meaning of the phrase. In order to disambiguate a place name it looks at other place names in the same phrase and finds places that are near other places (countryname, provinces, or other toponyms) referred to in the same phrase.

The service does only return the place it considers most important. It would be possible to return a list of places if several places are listed in the phrase. It is not planned to return potential alternative places.

Marc

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the explanation. I'm imagining a blog post or something that might go like this:

"Barack Obama visited his family in Kailua, Oahu, before returning to Chicago Illinois"

I guess the current system would randomly return either:

a) Kailua, Oahu

or

b) Chicago Illinois

It would be great for our application if both locations were return, and I think that georss should be expanded to include multiple geo-points as has been suggested at georss.org

It sounds like your service is unlikely to return multiple locations any time soon. I guess it might be possible to create our own service that did such a thing if we downloaded your database and hacked something on top of that ....

Many thanks in advance
CHEERS> SAM

I second that request.
It would be really great to get this?
How can this be done?