GeoNames Forum

marc wrote:

If we provide a list then it should have the same time zone names we use in the download. Do you think it makes sense to create a list with GMT offset? And for the DST should is is sufficient to give the offset without dates and years?
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This is exactly what I had in mind.
A simple list with GMT and DST offsets according to the time zone names you use in geonames would be just great. Thanks!
Dates for DST sound (and look) complicated. A simple offset number should be sufficient.

Cheers,
Petros

Thanks for the reply Marc,

IU am using dreamweaver and under the webservices panel it asks for:

URL of the WDSL file
and Proxy generator (currently .NET VB)

I have tried entering the url of the webservice http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch? plus loads of other variant but it keeps coming up with an error - cannot read wdsl file

Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Thank you for the prompt fixing of this!

hello, i am new to this site, amazing.

was trying to find out what the fastest way is to use a URL to enter

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?postalcode=8027&country=CH&radius=10

and it will give me also an Elevation value if available.

my goal is to use

input field: Country Name, Postal Code (world wide, or at least Europe)
and get result of ideally:

City, State/Province, Long, Lat, Elevation, GMT, DST

I am trying to access the "nearby place" service with JSON, but appending the JSON suffix to the script still gives me an XML output:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceNameJSON?lat=47.3&lng=9&style=MEDIUM

Appending other suffixes resulted in the same output as well, I guess this is the default behaviour of the web service server.

Best regards,
Ligius

Thank you for the information. Here are the results of some queries using a 2Ghz P4, 1Gig RAM, Windows XP, mySQL4-something, fulltext indexing on ansiname, SQLYog as client. Further queries of the same parameter are cached, though query cache is not activated.

[ 62 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('timiso*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 359 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('new york*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 31 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('comman*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 63 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('trepid*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 375 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('stap*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 547 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('london*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 688 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('paris*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

[ 359 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('new york*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT 100

Now without boolean mode enabled:

[ 687 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('new york') LIMIT 100

[ 406 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('london') LIMIT 100

[ 344 ms]*/ SELECT geonameid,ansiname,name,latitude,longitude,feature_class,feature_code,country_code,admin1_code FROM geonames WHERE MATCH(ansiname) AGAINST ('paris') LIMIT 100
...

So on my machine (developer) queries using Boolean mode typically take about the same amount of time. Sorry for the long post but as you can see performance varies randomly and cannot be judged accurately. The database is not yet deployed on the production server, but performance is expected to improve at least 10 to 100-fold.

Best regards,
Ligius

Ok, over a month on and I have got absolutely nowhere. Have decided to use PostgreSQL as it seems to be the best for GIS stuff.

Could someone please help me get started, I have downloaded it and tried following some examples on the internet all of which fail.

Basically I want a site as mentioned at top to type in placename and then within (x) miles and properties matching this to be dispalyed.

All I have got is postcodes of the properties.

Can anyone goive me a step by step approach.??? PLEASE?

i would also be very thankfull for a postal-code dumb. (if possible, the complete thing. but only germany would also be ok)

my e-mail is: pl(at)i22data.de

thank you veeeeery much!

Great Marc, it worked! If you ever come to Ferrara you have a pizza from me!
I also liked the street geocoding made integrating Yahoo! and Google but it works only fro US and Canada. Do you know if there's any georss-street-geocoding for europe?
Guido

Actually, in SQL mode it looks like this:
SELECT * FROM geonames1 WHERE MATCH(asciiname) AGAINST ('vatic*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)

Thank you Marc. Should I have another baby I'll let you know for a population update! I prepared another XML without coordinates http://82.90.147.33/geofeedNoCoord.xml. There are three items: Gaibanella, Cento (a bigger village) and Ferrara (a city). Only Gaibanella is not recognised.
Ciao

Hi is it possible to include the postcodes in the file for Australia?

Thanks

Ari (ari_b7@hotmail.com)

Thank you Marc. You can test my feed at http://82.90.147.33/geofeed.xml. If you need to add there some places for a better test just let me know. The population of Gaibanella is about 2000 souls plus me, my wife and my daughter.
Ciao

Hello,
I am trying to use standard search with the JSON webservice but I cannot seem to pass wildcard arguments with the query. Example:
http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?q=vatic&maxRows=100&formatted=true

I've placed '%', '*', and '?' url-encoded characters but it still does not return results ('Vatican' in this example). Is there any way I am doing this wrong or are searches in boolean mode not supported yet?

Best regards,
Ligius

We'd been using the postal code webservice for Canada and UK, and a few days ago our queries stopped working. We had been using the first three letters in the postal code to do queries like this:

http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?postalcode=V4L&country=CA&maxRows=1

It worked great and now returns zero results. Do you have any idea what happened, whether this service will be restored, and if so when ?

hi,

also deutschland mit strassen wäre fein.
ich fummel in perl dran rum.

cu, Jens

If I look for "gaibanella" on GeoNames homepage I get the right result. If I try to publish a RSS using the GeoRSS converters available at http://www.geonames.org/rss-to-georss-converter.html the same place can't be geocoded. What am I doing wrong?
Thank You
Guido Sitta

Thanks Marc,

I'm interested to receive it in eMail too, at proffnet@proffnet.com.

Regards,
Mariusz

hi,

kennt einer ne open source map datei oder
irgendeine mglkeit maps darzustellen mit den daten?

cu, Jens

Hi Marc

I downloaded the database for Australia but it contained towns and suburbs with geocodes but no postal codes. Looking at some other comments this may be standard - but I would like to do is implement a postcode to map lookup, so I need the associated postcodes.

Are they available?

Many thanks

Shane McNally

webmaster at illuka.com