GeoNames Forum

Hello everybody, I'm new here and I haven't started using the service yet, but I am designing a geocoding application, probably using the data on my own server rather than the web service. To start with I would use just UK data.

I'm trying to work out the best way to get the information from users and present alternatives if appropriate for them to select the right place. It's got to work on mobile devices so I don't want to rely on javascript.

I am thinking I would load the data into MySQL tables and give users a text input box to enter a place name or postcode, use this to search for likely data and present it as a list, probably with a Google map if they have javascript enabled.

Does anybody have any examples on the web I could have a look at to help me with ideas please?

I've just been having another look around this site and the 'postcodes' pages are a good starting point for what I'm trying to do, but I would still be interested to see other people's implementations.

I'm doing some stuff with hotels and the big problem you'll have with UK data is that the Postoffice won't release full geocode data down to the last part of the postcode. Grrrr, grrr, grrr, write to your MP, I'm well pissed off about it.

There're discussions about this on Google maps forums, and you can get a list of countries which do allow geocoding from postcodes from Google as well. Apart from countries that can't organise proper maps of themselves, the UK is the only country that doesn't allow full geocoding. However you can get the data if you issue the request in jscript on Gmap, browser side, and then send that data back to your server. It's a pain to hack but it is possible to get down to a decent geocode accuracy this way. Automating it is not as simple as a standard html GET to the geocode service.

Thanks for the tips John.

The lack of full postcode isn't too important for my application, and the users would mostly be providing town/village names anyway.

My question is more about the user interface and presentation rather than the back-end processing, and I would still like to see more examples if anybody can oblige?