GeoNames Forum

I'm working on a web app with a local search component. I am trying to accomplish two bits of neighborhood geocoding (on the cheap, of course).

1. What neighborhood is a lat/long point inside? (I could do this with the webservice if it wasn't for the next point).

2. Given a lat long point, a list of nearby neighborhoods.

I think I need to import the raw Zillow shapefiles into the mySQL database but I have no idea what mathematical calculations to do for the boundary checking for a lat/long pair (for 1). For 2, I was thinking about calculating the center of each neighborhood and then some trigonometry to find nearby neighborhoods.

This is a bit intimidating for a novice and I'm not quite sure where to start. Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks!

I suggest you use postgres/postgis instead of mysql.

Marc

It's a Rails app and I'm the intern, so I don't think switching the database is a great plan... I found that the urbanmapping neighborhood API offers centroids so I think I'll just use that instead. Thanks for the advice, though.