GeoNames Forum

Hi to all,
my company has subscribed to the geonames web service .
We also use a SQL server db, imported from geoname files.
We got a problem when we try to retrieve and view for a particular location name.
Our problem is to know is there is a particular field that give us the information of the relevance of the searched place. we would like to present our customers the most relevant places at first.

is possible? any suggest?

thanks Massimo

There is no single field for sorting as it depends on what the application/user wants to achieve. Fields that are normally used are: featurecode, population, country, continent, name similarity,term frequency/inverse document frequency, etc.

Marc

Hi,
thanks for reply, said in a simple manner, i would want to know how geonames ordination method works.

http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=san+diego&country=

does anyone know?

thanks Massimo

The WebServices certainly do some good stuff on the server side to order the result sets of a search. We are working on automatic disambiguation of place names to GeoNames IDs, and we have found that simply taking the top hit on a WebServices search query is often adequate.

Many of the documents we process have hundreds of place names, so we would like to reproduce the nice ordering of results when querying GeoNames data in a database rather than slamming the WebService.

I understand the reluctance to publicize the server source code, but I would second jossy80 that it would be super helpful to have some more hints about how exactly the results get ordered. With the geoname table in one's local database, could one expect similar results by simply ordering query results by featurecode, population, etc?

Thanks for the awesome service and datasets!