GeoNames Forum

there is nothing weird.

findNearby returns everything including hotels,
findNearbyPlaceName returns populated places including neighbourhoods (PPLX)

your query returns populated places, and Neuilly-sur-Seine has the feature code PPL in the database.

Best

Marc

Sorry if I was not clear.
What I meant if that, with the last query, I'd expect to get Paris as an answer (since the point is in Paris) but I get Neuilly-sur-Seine.
I guess that is because the point is nearer (in distance) from Neuilly city-center than from Paris city-center.

So, instead of 'nearest place' for coordinates, is there a way to get the PPL that contains these particular coordinates ?

Thanks a lot

As far as I know Neuilly-sur-Seine is independent of Paris the city. Wasn't Sarkozy a Mayor there?

Information about Metropolitan areas and relation of PPL forming them is not yet supported:
http://groups.google.com/group/geonames/browse_thread/thread/c6bcb654641e8b66

Best

Marc

Indeed that's an independant city.
So - and this is my original question - , when I give coordinates of a point which is in Paris, I don't understand why I get Neuilly and not Paris, cf:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearby?lat=48.86833190917969&lng=2.295694351196289&featureClass=P&featureCode=PPLA&featureCode=PPL&featureCode=PPLC

(Ths coordinates: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=fr&geocode=&q=48.86833190917969+2.295694351196289&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=27.22791,74.179688&ie=UTF8&ll=48.870474,2.305756&spn=0.044036,0.144882&t=h&z=13 )

I guess that what I'm looking is a containedInPPL-like feature ? (which is an independent feature from what you're mentioning with metropolitan areas)

Thanks

GeoNames doesn't know the boundaries of Paris. The service is called 'nearBy' and returns the nearest city (distance to centroid).

Best

Marc