GeoNames Home | Postal Codes | Download / Webservice | About 

GeoNames Forum
  [Search] Search   [Recent Topics] Recent Topics   [Groups] Back to home page 
[Register] Register / 
[Login] Login 
Geoname Hierarchies  XML
Forum Index -> Administrative Divisions
Author Message
philsmart



Joined: 13/06/2007 21:31:45
Messages: 11
Offline

Hi,

All toponyms have a admin division tag (well maybe admin1 to admin3 etc) which are string values. However the heirachy web service is able to retrieve geoname records from a base geonamesID. May question being, how to you know the hierarchy of geonames from a base geonamesID, do you derive the hierarchy from the String admin and country tags for each geoname, or do you store the heirarchy explicitly. I suppose what I am trying to say is, why do you not store the geonameID of the admin divisions and countries in their respective tag so we can directly access the geonames. This is not a criticism, I am just curious.

Phil
marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
Offline

Hi Phil

The admin tags usually are meaningful, issued by the responsible authorities and used by many governmental applications and datasets. The geonameid is an id we have made up ourselves. It is easy to convert one format to the other and we thought storing the official tags is more useful.

Marc

[WWW]
kekoav



Joined: 09/04/2009 03:27:53
Messages: 2
Offline

I think this is a relevent thread, I have the same question as the previous guy. How do I find the geoname ID of the associated admin area for a location(admin1)? I get a code, and can link to the name, but this name does not map directly onto the name column for the geoname table. Why can't the adminCodes.txt file have the geoname ID of the admin area as well.

Or how can I accomplish this with the data as is? I am currently doing a query based on the name, but I miss a lot of admin areas, as there are differences in prefixes and postfixes for these locations.
kekoav



Joined: 09/04/2009 03:27:53
Messages: 2
Offline

I found my own answer, I just query the geoname table looking for the ADM1 feature code, with the same admin1_code value.
 
Forum Index -> Administrative Divisions
Go to:   
Powered by JForum 2.1.5 © JForum Team