GeoNames Forum

I realize this is a tough one, but:

has anyone attempted to create the relationship as to what places lay on (are contained in) a particular island?
perhaps using other data in conjunction to geonames?

Or if it can't be done, i'd like to know why.

Thhanks,
Britske

It has not yet been done as far as I know. With polygon information for islands it would be rather easy to achieve, but without this it is a lot of work. So I would start looking for island polygons.

Best

Marc

for those interested and for future reference:

it can be done pretty realiably in conjunction with Yahoo Geoplanet. given that:
1. island is a featurecode in Yahoo geoplanet.
2. island returns children.

so, given all islands in the geonames db, use: /places webservice:

1. lookup islands by name and filter on type

i.e: http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places$and(.q(texel),.type(island))?appid=YOUR_APPID_HERE
gives: Texel. an island in the netherlands

2. (optinonal) disambiguate by lat/ long if necessary.

You now have the woeid of the island.

3. iteratively walk down the hierarchy-tree until entities of type Town are reached using webservice:
/place/<woeid>/children

i.e: http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/12474877/children?appid=YOUR_APPID_HERE

Cheers,
Britske

of course you have to map those woeid-towns back to geoname-ids, but since you have lat/ long pairs, name and country that can be done pretty realiably and efficiently.