GeoNames Forum

The findNearbyPlaceName reverse-geocoding web service currently resolves co-ordinates to an 'administrative domain'. When geocoding photos, that's useful, but not as useful as a nearby point-of-interest might be.

For the sake of argument, say we're visiting Paris, and we take several pictures of and from the Eiffel Tower at lat=48.85832 & lng=2.29452

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=48.85832&lng=2.29452 gives us 'Invalides' at 0.86 km.

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipedia?lat=48.85832&lng=2.29452 gives us 'Effiel Tower' at 0.03 km.

I've just been geotagging pictures from a recent Disneyland vacation. Anyone here know where 'Neff' is? (a nearby subdomain in Anaheim, apparently). I've had to manually fix up nearly a thousand images with either 'Disneyland' or 'California Adventure'.

I'd really like to see a web service offered that includes a configurable mix of point-of-interest data when reverse-geocoding. In the interests of sparking discussion, I'd like to propose a three-phase API:

Step One: an API that returns a list of featurecodes and description in an easily-parsed format (I think this exists?). I'm imagining this would be used by an application to build a preference panel for the user to select which points of interest should be included (like the selection tree in the web UI)

Step Two: the application provides a list of featurecodes to the web API, which returns some opaque ID as a private shorthand representation of that combination. This is to avoid geonames having to maintain state, or deal with URLs with a very large number of parameters per query. I'd imagine the application would do this each time it started, and whenever the preferences were changed.

Step Three: the opaque key can be used as an optional parameter to a reverse-geotagging API, to control what is & isn't included in the response. I'd love to see one that merges wikipedia data, even if it's all lumped under one featurecode dedicated to wikipedia entries (since they don't seem to classify).

Paul

Hi Paul

There is also a rather undocumented service called 'Nearby' which returns all feature classes and codes :
http://ws.geonames.org/findNearby?lat=48.85832&lng=2.29452

More in this thread :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/203.page#1086

The feature codes are not yet available as web service API. But they are included in the daily datatbase dump, which should be sufficient for nearly all needs :
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/featureCodes.txt

Cheers

Marc

Execllent! now to figure out how to put them to good use...

-- Paul