GeoNames Forum

I'm processing some data where I will have the title (and thus, once it's encoded, the URL) of some Wikipedia articles that I want the coordinates for. I can't find an example of doing this using the Java APi, though it seems to work fine on the web (http://api.geonames.org/wikipediaSearch?title=Philadelphia&maxRows=1&username=demo).

Naively, I want something like this:
Code:

 myPlace.setWikipediaUrl("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia"); //OR
 myPlace.setTitle("Philadelphia"); //and then...
 Double lat = myPlace.getLatitude();
 Double lon = myPlace.getLongitude();

But that doesn't actually search anything. However, Webservice.wikipediaSearch doesn't look like it allows you specify the title or URL.

Doing this would make my app much more efficient; if I know the article is talking about [[Philadelphia]] I can get the coordinates for the exact place that is meant, whereas a simple search of Geonames for "philadelphia" has 2000+ results!

di you try the method Webservice.wikipediaSearchForTitle(title,language) ?

Marc

Yes, I tried that last week as well.
Code:

WebService.setUserName("myUsername");
 List<WikipediaArticle> wikiResults = WebService.wikipediaSearchForTitle(
                                 "Philadelphia","en");
 for (WikipediaArticle r : wikiResults) {
      System.out.println(r.getLatitude());
 }

Errors start with:
Code:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/jdom/input/SAXBuilder
 	at org.geonames.WebService.wikipediaSearchForTitle(Unknown Source)
 	at parsetextandurls.ParseTextAndURLs.main(ParseTextAndURLs.java:100)
 Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder
 at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
 	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
 	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
 	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
 	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
 	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
 	... 2 more

It seems like a jdom error, which doesn't appear to be required (if I "import org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder;" it gets marked as unused, too). I tried adding jdom-1.1 to the classpath and still get the same result.

jdom is used by the library not directly by your code. You don't have to import it in your code, but it needs to be on the classpath.
I suspect there is something wrong with your classpath.

Best

Marc

Thanks, once I knew I was on the right track I was able to solve the classpath problem.

But now that the function's working, I don't think it does quite what I need. For example, if I search for Louisiana, the first result is Shreveport, Louisiana (latitude 32.4681) whereas I want just Louisiana (latitude 31.0139). (For some other searches like Philadelphia, the first result *is* the desired one.)

I already have a function that does a non-exact search of toponym names in GeoNames if it encounters one in free text; I was hoping that if I knew with 100% certainty that a specific Wikipedia article was meant (because it's [[linked]]), I could retrieve just that one location using this alternate method. Is there any way to do that?

You can iterate over the result list and get the one with the same name/url.

Best Regards

Marc