GeoNames Forum

If I look for "gaibanella" on GeoNames homepage I get the right result. If I try to publish a RSS using the GeoRSS converters available at http://www.geonames.org/rss-to-georss-converter.html the same place can't be geocoded. What am I doing wrong?
Thank You
Guido Sitta

Hi Guido

The RSS to GeoRSS converter is a natural language geocoder. If it does not geocode your text than this means that the certainty for the placename is below the threshold.

We don't have the population of Gaibanella in our database. Do you know it? The population of a place does have an influence on the threshold. You can also try to reformulate the text to increase the threshold.

I can say more if you post the link to your RSS feed.

Regards

Marc

Thank you Marc. You can test my feed at http://82.90.147.33/geofeed.xml. If you need to add there some places for a better test just let me know. The population of Gaibanella is about 2000 souls plus me, my wife and my daughter.
Ciao

Ciao Guido

I have updated the population of Gaibanella with 2003 inhabitants :
http://www.geonames.org/maps/geonameId=3176416

Gaibanella is not a large city and the number of inhabitants will barely increase the relevance.
The feed url you have given already contains lat/lng and I cannot find Gaibanella in it, so I cannot know wether this update is already sufficient.
We will deploy a new version of the natural language geocoder in a couple of days with (hopefully) improved threshold handling.

Saluti
Marc

Thank you Marc. Should I have another baby I'll let you know for a population update! I prepared another XML without coordinates http://82.90.147.33/geofeedNoCoord.xml. There are three items: Gaibanella, Cento (a bigger village) and Ferrara (a city). Only Gaibanella is not recognised.
Ciao

Guido

You can also update the population yourself, if you have another baby. Geonames has a wiki-edit interface, everybody can improve the database.

I am surprised that Cento and Ferrara are discovered. The language detection of the rss-to-georss is rudimentary and only looks at the top level domain of the feed url (if no language is set in the feed itself) and is using English if no country specific domain is used. For the ip address of your feed it means English is assumed as the feed language and not Italian. It is therefore surprising that Ferrara and Cento are recognised. From an English point of view an Italian text looks like meaningless gibberish.
There are four ways of fixing it :

1. you can specify the feed language directly in your feed.
2. you can add the parameter feedLanguage=it to the conversion url
3. you can put the feed on a .it domain
4. you can wait till we have improved the language detection

If have tested it with 2. (adding feedLanguage=it to the rss-to-georss url) and it correctly discovers Gaibanella.

Ciao

Marc

Great Marc, it worked! If you ever come to Ferrara you have a pizza from me!
I also liked the street geocoding made integrating Yahoo! and Google but it works only fro US and Canada. Do you know if there's any georss-street-geocoding for europe?
Guido

Hi there,
searching the posts I found this one... Here you guys sorted the problem out. And it looks like the same problem I experence

But with the hints given here I can't solve my rss problem. I am new here, so I probably forgot something or I don't understand

If I look for Westerbork on the GeoNames homepage I do get results, but not when using the GeoRSS convertor.

What I did so far:
- I specified the feed language (which is dutch -> nl)
- the feed is on a .nl domain

any suggestions??

Pieter