GeoNames Forum

I'm a relitivly new bash shell script programmer, but am getting reasonable results. I'm writing a script that will do some processing on a gps trace, the details are not that important, but I would like to attach a text label to the trace to say what it is, and where it goes.

so far my logic goes as follows:

use gpsbabel simplify to reduce it to a few points along the trace (concept is sound, need some experimentation to find the corect perameters though);

reverse geocode each point using geonames;

parse the xml files (i think i have that one worked out, grep is my friend);

remove duplicates and;

concatinate all the data.

geonames seems to be the besst provider for this data, but I can't find all of the data I need. One call to countrySubdivision will give me the country code and reagon code. A call to findNearbyPlaceName will find a good reference to nearest village etc, this is as deep as I need, and seems perfect.

There seems to be a large gap, somthing like county or nearest city would be really nice, is ther easy way to access this?

GB, ENG, Leigh tells most people nothing useful -- including me if it happens to be next to a motorway I was driving 70 down for 3 hours.

A better result would be either GB, ENG, Nottingham, Leigh or GB, ENG, Sussex, Leigh (note that I'm picking place names out of thin air here) though even more data would be good if it exists.

On a related note, is there any better way to do this whole operation?

On a moderatly related note, this is going to be included in an open source product, which could potientially have a reasonably large user base, 60 server requests per user per day would be the most that it would normally make. Should I be concerned about request volumes or not?

For the record, despite a few small glitches that I havent worked out yet, this is a awesome service.

as for the number of requests for the free web service. 60 requests per day and user is no problem if you have only a couple of users. If you expect thousands or millions of users then it is absolutely impossible and you have to look for another solution.

Marc