GeoNames Forum

Given the wgs84_pos Point coordinates in an xml file like that:

<wgs84_pos:lat>18.8</wgs84_pos:lat>
<wgs84_pos:long>-69.6166667</wgs84_pos:long>

How can I know from geonames to which country and city do these coordinates belong?

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=18.8&lng=-69.6166667

Thank you mark!

But how could you know this?
I want to write a program that can take the Point and returns the city and the state.
How can I access geonames ontology to query for the information?

It is very simple. If you look at the url then you will see that the latitude and longitude are part of the url:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=18.8&lng=-69.6166667

You can write the code to build the url from the coordinates and parse the result yourself. Or you can use a library for this:

http://www.geonames.org/export/client-libraries.html

thanks you very much
I appreciate ur help

I imported the Geonames dump into MySQL using another tutorial on the forums. I wondering if its possible to perform reverse geocoding on this dataset(effeciently!)?