GeoNames Forum

hello,

I have a question about an apparent difference in results that I get when using the web service or use the download files.

My aim is to produce a list of all names in the countries Angola, Botswana and Namibia.

When I use the web service I retrieve 300 results. As that's less than the max 1000 that could be returned, I supposed that those were all the available names for those countries (the request I used was: http://api.geonames.org/search?country=ao&country=bw&country=na&type=xml&syle=full&username=demo).

Then I downloaded the zip files for those 3 countries, and together they contain more than 50.000 entries.

Can someone explain to me this difference ? Does my web service query somehow filter out a lot of the data that is available in the download files ?

thanks in advance for your replies
kind regards
Heikki Doeleman

The web service is not intended to provide all features for a country, this would not make any sense.
The webservice clearly says in the first element totalResultsCount=51808, per default it returns 100 rows.

Best

Marc

thank you for your reply.

I'm still curious to know how exactly works the web service: obviously it filters on something, but what is the filter exactly ? I can't find any documentation on this.

Could you shed some light on this ?

thank you and kind regards
Heikki Doeleman

The documentation is here:
http://www.geonames.org/export/geonames-search.html

It is a search service and returns the features for the search criteria.

Marc