GeoNames Forum

Hi,

looking through the postal codes for some european countries, I find that there are a number of entries for one postal code in some countries.

E.g. austria has
1010 Wien
1010 Wien 1. Bezirk (Innere Stadt)
1010 Innere Stadt
(Wien is Vienna, Innere Stadt means inner city (downtown))
which all name the same place.
Or 2000 with a number of villages (different places in this case).

In general that's not a problem, but our application (so far using the german zipcodes from opengeodb) associates a place name when the user enters a postal code.
So: is there any chance to select something like a main entry for each postal code?

Another problem I see here is, how to deal with updates.
There are no IDs in the postal code tables.
How would I update an entry? Should the country_code, postal code and place name be used as the key?

Hi Morus

You can use the postal code file from Statistics Austria. It has only about half of the number of entries :

http://www.statistik.at/verzeichnis/gemeindeverzeichnis.shtml

For updates you can use country code, postal code and place name.

Regards

Marc

Hi Marc,

thanks a lot for your help.

Unfortunately austria was just an example and I have similar problems for
Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, France, UK and Italy.
(If we add eastern europe as well, the might be some more, but that's not clear yet.)

Do have similar sources for these countries?

regards
Morus

Hi Morus

I am afraid you will have to change your application. You cannot assume that the postal code is sufficient in all countries to uniquely identify a place.

You could use our postal code autocomplete lookup for this:
http://www.geonames.org/export/ajax-postalcode-autocomplete.html
Or you will have to develop your own version of it.

Otherwise you can try to use admincode3 and determine a main place comparing the place name with the name of admin name3.

Here an example
http://www.geonames.org/postalcode-search.html?q=3995&country=ch
The 'Gemeinde' of all four places is now Ernen and you can assume Ernen is the most important place out of the four. But in this case it only works because the Gemeinde Ausserbinn was merged with Ernen at the beginning of this year. (There was a long discussion as the people from Ausserbinn refused to merge)

Regards

Marc

Hi Marc,

of course you're right.
We were just lucky (or unlucky since it drove us in a questionable direction) to have a simple list of zip code and one place name for germany when we started.
While such a list could presumably be created for each country (a german zip code might apply to a number of villages as well, the opengeodb people just choose one), I understand that this is a difficult task and the data is not necessarily there. Even the helpful austrian list you named does not provide a list of unique names for most zip codes.
OTOH there are cases like Vienna (AT) or Bruxelles (BE) where the the same place is listed with different names.
I'll look into the admin names and codes for some further cleanup.

As far as our application is concerned, I allready accepted, that we have to forgo a display of a place name, if a postal code with several places is entered.

Thanks for your help,
regards
Morus

Same problem with places in Belgium, in bold below :

Country:
BE
Zip :
1000
Cities response :
Bruxelles
Bruxelles Bruxelles

Country:
BE
Zip :
1457
Cities response :
Walhain
Walhain Walhain
Walhain Tourinnes-Saint-Lambert
Walhain Nil-Saint-Vincent-Saint-Martin
Walhain Walhain-Saint-Paul

Can you explain that ?

Thank you in advance for your help
Julian

Thanks. The duplicate entries will be deleted.

Best

Marc

Hello,

I noticed the same thing about several cities in Belgium. For example: http://www.geonames.org/postalcode-search.html?q=7170&country=BE

1 Manage 7170 Belgium Wallonie Hainaut Charleroi
2 Manage La Hestre 7170 Belgium Wallonie Hainaut Charleroi
3 Manage Bellecourt 7170 Belgium Wallonie Hainaut Charleroi
4 Manage Faytlez-Manage 7170 Belgium Wallonie Hainaut Charleroi
5 Manage Boisd'Haine 7170 Belgium Wallonie Hainaut Charleroi

Why the value "Manage" is repeated for each line?

Thanks in advance.
Xav

PS: by the way, it should be "Fayt-lez-Manage" for the 4th and "Bois-D'haine" for the 5th.

Xav

Steptom is currently working on this:
http://www.geonames.org/recent-changes/user/steptom/

http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/15/2172.page#8909

It is an awesome work he is doing and we will then be able to drop the current postal code records and populate them with the ones provided by steptom.

Best Regards

Marc