GeoNames Forum

I really appreciate your free web services as a prooving ground for new development. In our business, I generally need to come up with all administrative entities, a postal code, nearest populated place, address or nearby roads, nearby landmarks and elevation for a given location (by description or coordinates). It is impossible to get all this in a single call to any service, but GeoNames is a valuable source for a lot of it.

I just finished some reverse geocoding work based on your extendedFindNearby service, and was surprised to discover that its return XML is fairly unpredictable. In my neck of the woods, for example, http://ws.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=40.037573&lng=-105.246914 returns a single nest of useful elements. In a neighboring state, however, http://ws.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=40.954201&lng=-96.687241 returns a completely different XML schema requiring a more elaborate approach to parsing out what might be useful.

Guidance or clarification on this service would be appreciated. If I can figure out how to use GeoNames efficiently, we would seriously consider moving to your commerical web service model.

The extendedFindNearby returns the most detailed possible result.
1. In the US it tries to return the findNearbyAddress,
2. if this does not find anything then it returns the findNearbyPlaceName
3. if this does not return anything either then it returns the countrycode and the continent code.

Marc