GeoNames Forum

I'm looking at integrating GeoNames data into our travel website, and I'm wondering if there are any guidelines.

Our plan is evolving, so what follows represents our current ideas. Our plan is to hold a subset of the GeoNames data on our server, to avoid heavy hits to your server. In particular we'd hold data for anywhere that one of our users had tagged. [We'd start off by extracting data from a downloaded version of the db.]

When a user tags a location with interesting data (photos & notes) we'd pull location data from GeoNames if we didn't already hold the data. If location data isn't already available, we'd be keen to feed it back to GeoNames. Is there an API for this? In particular, is there a way to provisionally associate a GeoNames place id with new data? It seems sensible for us to use the same id numbers. I'm assuming that your id numbers are immutable. Is that correct?

We'd also be keen to feed back any edits that our users make: they use GPS units, so chances are that they'll sometimes have more accurate data than GeoNames. Is there an API for submitting modifications?

Apart from beauty spots, our users are also want to be able to track points of interest to the community. What guidelines are there for points of interest that you would like to collect? I wouldn't be surprised if some of the data from our community included things that would be of more general interest.

Thanks,

Jeff

Hi Jeff

There is an API for creating and updating GeoNames toponyms. The creation service will return the GeoNameId of the newly created record. The GeoNameId is indeed an immutable sequence number. Please contact me for details, the API is not yet officically released.

We are intestested in POIs of general interests like museusm, restaurants, and so on.

Thanks a lot of planing to share your places with us.

Cheers

Marc