GeoNames Forum

Has the service had lots of new place names added for the UK?

Previously a request like:

http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?postalcode=W4&countryBias=GB

would return about 6 results, all of which were relevant place names.

However, it now returns over 1000 results, most of which appear to be local council wards, not really place names that people would identify with.

I apologise if I'm complaining about GeoNames being too good by making improvements, but is there now a simple way to search for only place names?

Many thanks for your help.

Yesterday we have switched to a new dataset with the total 1.6 mio British postal codes: http://geonames.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/uk-open-public-data/
We have to figure out how to make optimal use of the data.

Best

Marc

granrojo: For England and Wales we could assign the outer postal code part to the parish using the boundaries and include it in the place name search. For the full postal codes we could also use the parish name instead of the ward name.

Robert: As mentioned in the blog posting the postal code product is called 'code-point.

Best

Marc

@marc

Sorry, I just re-read your comment and realised you may actually be asking me for feedback.

Although being able to search with a full postcode is great, I can't think of many uses where the council ward is relevant.

What type of names are returned when when you use the parish instead? If it's the same info that is with the download then it doesn't appear much better.

It would be great if we could retrieve the road names from a postcode, but I guess Royal Mail own that data?

For me the old results are much more useful (I've had to download them), any chance you could run a separate web service with just the old results?

Hope it helps, thanks.

There is a new parameter 'isReduced' to indicate that only the outer code is desired:

http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?postalcode=W4&countryBias=GB&isReduced=true