GeoNames Forum

Hi all,

we use Meteoalarm.eu weather information to alert the users of our weather application. Our users can choose their favorite cities they want to get alerts for, so we need to match the cities with regions that the alerts are issued for. We use Geonames.org database to do so.

Unfortunately, there are some countries that have different regions on Meteoalarm and Geonames. For example:

UK
Meteoalarm - http://www.meteoalarm.eu/en_UK/0/0/UK-United_Kingdom.html
Geonames - http://www.geonames.org/GB/administrative-division-united-kingdom.html

Slovak Republic
Meteoalarm - http://www.meteoalarm.eu/en_UK/0/0/SK-Slovakia.html
Geonames - http://www.geonames.org/SK/administrative-division-slovakia.html

Switzerland
Meteoalarm - http://www.meteoalarm.eu/en_UK/0/0/CH-Switzerland.html
Geonames - http://www.geonames.org/CH/administrative-division-switzerland.html

Although we could go through the list and match them manually, it's not really possible for all the countries. The reason is, that the areas overlap each other both ways, what doesn't let us determine how to match them. Here is an example from Slovakia:

- city of Prievidza belongs to "Trenciansky" on Geonames and to "Horne Ponitrie" on Meteoalarm
- city of Trencin belongs to "Trenciansky" on Geonames and to "Severozapad" on Meteoalarm
- city of Zlate Moravce belongs to "Nitriansky" on Geonames and to "Horne Ponitrie" on Meteoalarm

Have you got any suggestion on how to resolve it to let us help our users to get as accurate weather alerts as possible?

Thanks a lot, your help is much appreciated,
Milan

Meteoalarm has 'invented' their own divisions, for Switzerland these divisions have absolutely nothing todo with administrative divisions, they are more focusing on areas with similar meteorological conditions.
What you could try is to find out how deep you have to go and create a match list from the adm division to the meteorological division. I don't know whether Meteoalarm provides boundary information of their divisions. If they do you could use this information.

Marc

Thanks Marc,

that's what we are trying to do.