GeoNames Forum

first, thanks for such a great service! Badly needed and very much appreciated, thanks guys.

One thing I'd like to be able to to do is given a geonamesid for a location, look up it's parent locations to form a hierarchy. So if you have the id for a district of a town, you'd then be able to get the town itself, followed by the state, followed by the country.

is anything like this possible?

Anonymous wrote:

... you'd then be able to get the town itself, followed by the state, followed by the country.....

Cool idea, I second that!

I think we should be able to roll out a prototype with country and first order subdivision pretty soon. For more levels of the hierarchy we currently don't have enough information ready. For many countries it should be possible to derive it from other datasets. (US and Europe) For many other countries it will be difficult to get the necessary information.

Would you be interested in a prototype returning the country and the first subdivision (state/province)?

Marc

hi marc

country and first subdivision would be brilliant. In fact, I'd say it would fit the requirements of most users. It's enough to differnetiate between ambiguous place names but not so much that it would cause an information overload for users.

thanks for your help

rick

Hi Rick

A first prototype for a hierarchy service is ready. Any comment is welcome.

Example :
http://ws.geonames.org/hierarchy?geonameId=1

It returns country, first subdivision and the geoname record itself. In this order.
Only about a third of all subdivisions are already mapped to their geoname id. If you can tell us which countries are important to you, I have a look at them and make sure these are mapped to their geonameId.

Marc

marc wrote:

... A first prototype for a hierarchy service is ready. ....

Wow, all tested IDs returned correct data.
Can I help to make the relation country -> contintent?

Thanks for this service, and want to mark, that needed also dump of this table with relations between countries, regions and cities.

Dear All,
I want to integrate the geonames website into my website.
but i havn't no idea for the basic step.
Please tell me the initial step to integrate the site with my own site.
Please help me to do that.
Thanks and regards,
Magesh.

Marc

it works great. thanks for taking the time to do this. For me, the priority countries are all the english speaking ones, US, UK, Canada, Australia etc

magesh, which platform/language are you using on your site? PHP, ASP, Java or something else? You need to select the relevant web service from this page :

http://www.geonames.org/export/

and then use your platform or language to query the web service and process the resulting XML data

hth
alex

The hierarchy web service now returns the continent in the first position of the result. Example :

http://ws.geonames.org/hierarchy?geonameId=1

Marc

As this is still undocumented, I just wanted to confirm that its OK to use this hierarchy webservice? As I have a really cool idea for a use of it!

Yes you can use the service. You can drop me an email (marc@geonames.org) so we can discuss it with you in case we would like to change something before officially releasing the service.

Marc

Sorry that was me again, forgot I wasn't logged in... (found by refreshing the page eventually got a nice b/w captcha could read

I'm just about to try a using the service in a bit of testing, we see how get on, and will contact you before using it properly.

Wow, service is now more responsive and answer leaner.

The service is now taking the style parameter (SHORT,MEDIUM,LONG,FULL) just like the other services.

Marc