GeoNames Forum

I queried e.g. 47.68639 12.57111 about 30 times and got sometimes really wrong things, like Bavaria and Tirol at the same time. Bavaria is a state of Germany and Tirol is a state of Austria, for those who don't know. I understand that there are errors in the database, but how could the same position lead to different results?

I noticed similar things with nearly half of my positions. The place is not totally wrong most times, but also not correct. Often it is the next "district" and not the one, which was queried. If you would like to have examples please let me know.

Is it possible to to restrict the result to the number of the population? If, please let me know which syntax should be used with curl. The strange thing is, when I query with curl, I get data, but I can't see the population which I can see with firefox.

Hi

"47.68639 12.57111" is near the Austrian border in Bavaria :
http://www.geonames.org/maps/showOnMap?q=47.68639%2012.57111

It makes sense to get place names from Bavaria and Tirol for a reverse geocoding. Don't you think so?

Do you have an example for the curl command that does not return the population where firfox displays it?

Marc

Of course it makes sense to get places from another country, if you query _more_ than 1 position, but not with only 1 and then randomly right or wrong. I accept, that it is sometimes not easy to define the right place, but I don't understand the different results. I would understand if it is everytime worng.

Here is an example how I do the query:
curl -s http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=47.68639&lng=12.57111&radius=10&style=FULL

In this case I don't see no population via web too.

Can you give me an idea, in this case, how I can define automatically "Reit im Winkl" or "Ruhpolding", which is a little bit larger than Grabenkohlstatt, which is my first result.

I analyze the result with a bash-script by grep, sed, a.s.o and need criteria to define a place which is not the nearest one, but more known.

With my query I always get _very_ little villages which don't make a lot sense to me. I thought about the population as criteria, but any other idea is welcome.

I will try to find an example where I see a population via the web and not with curl.

Hi

You can use the findNearbyPostalCodes instead : http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=47.68639&lng=12.57111

Or you can only look at places with a population and discard the places without population data.

I don't understand why the service should return different results for the same query. Are you sure the problem is not somewhere else? Do you remember which query caused the problem?

Marc

Thanks Marc, I think "findNearbyPostalCodes" could fit my needs.

At the moment I have limited internet-access, so I cannot do not a lot of tests. In about 2-3 weeks I hope to do some tests again. And yes, I am sure the same query lead to different results and that I found very strange too. There could be a connection between a timeout of the query. I mean the first query had no result, and a 2nd query immediately after, lead to another geoname.

I am online again, and do some tests with the zip-code, eg:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=47.774321600&lng=13.060253300

<code>
<postalcode>5020</postalcode>
<name>Morzg</name>
<countryCode>AT</countryCode>
<lat>47.7666667</lat>
<lng>13.0666667</lng>
<adminCode1>SA</adminCode1>
<adminName1>Salzburg</adminName1>
<adminCode2>501</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Salzburg(Stadt)</adminName2>
<adminCode3>50101</adminCode3>
<adminName3>Salzburg</adminName3>
<distance>0.9768088216762807</distance>
</code>

This is correct, but I don't like the result "Morzg". I would like to have the "standard result" of the zip code 5020 which is the town of Salzburg. How can I query the zip code for 5020 in my example to get as result Salzburg or Salzburg(Stadt)? Maybe this fits my needs, when I do a double query. I mean first I query the zip-code and then I query the city name. For those who don't know Morzg is a part of the city of Salzburg. When I remember other queries, I think it is not so easy to use the adminName2 by default to get the desired result.