GeoNames Forum

Thanks Draco, I have fixed the country code for CS in our db as well.

Marc

The bug has been fixed.

Marc

Hi Piotr

I have implemented this. With the parameter lang=local you will get the result in the local language:

http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=warschau&maxRows=10&lang=local&style=full

Best

Marc

Hi Vadim

We have some relations between PPLX and their PPL, but we don't yet have any information about 'Metropolis' where PPL are considered part of a larger entity.

Best

Marc

Hi Sergio

GeoNames has a lot of worldwide reverse geocoding services. I guess you refer to the street level reverse geocoding available for US addresses? We can not offer it for lack of freely available data for Europe.
All European street level data sets are commercial. We can help you setup reverse geocoding with a commercial data provider, but we are not allowed to offer the service for free.

Best

Marc

Many times when two places have the same or similar name they are really two different places.
In this case it looks as if the place in the middle of the bay is a duplicate. The data for Alaska is from the US Geological Survey and normally has rather could quality.

Best

Marc

Hi Martin

You say that 'other web services are working'. Does this refer to other GeoNames services or services from other providers?
I am not familiar with Visual Studio. Could it be that they expect a SOAP web service? Our services are nearly all REST in XML or JSON.

Best

Marc

We are also trying to match postal code places with the toponyms from the main GeoNames database. Our goal is to have only one database. To have a seperate postal code download as we have now is not our goal, we want to unify the two databases.
As you say this is far from trivial and I don't believe it can be solved with a simple sql statement. We are using algorithms which look at the names in different languages, look for similar names (names are not always spellt exactly the same way), looking at the distance, feature code etc.

Best

Marc

Hi

GeoNames is primarily a data project. It is possible to use the data go generate maps, or display the places on a map, but we don't offer any software to do this.

Marc

Yes, exactly. The world is not as simple as we have modeled it. It is not always a real tree. From some points of view dependent countries are full countries for others they should be attached to an ancestor country.

See also the thread here:
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/948.page

Hi Aaron

At the moment we have a tree representation of countries and administrative divisions and we can place a country in only one continent.

The second reason is that we have not yet a working and consistent data set. We have started to compile a list of countries and dependent countries:
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/941.page#4210

I think getting an idea of what kind of countries we have and how the relations between them should be modeled is the first step and afterwards we can think about how it could be implemented.
Do you want to help with the compilation of the list and make it consistent? Not only for the US but also for other countries like France or the UK.

Cheers

Marc

I am afraid the dump script deleted the previous dump when moving the dump from the staging area to the download directory. I have changed the script to keep a backup of the previous dump. This doesn't help you now but will help in case this happens again.

In any case I did a couple of updates directly on the database in the last months so it is anyhow advisable to grab and load a full dump.

Best

Marc

Thanks for letting us know.
A lot of other sources list the postal code. For instance the official NJ website:
http://www.state.nj.us/nj/about/facts/njzips.html

We are more about geography and finding places rather than the latest usps valid codes. Many of our users expect us to list obsolete codes at least for a while. Of course it would be great to flag them with their correct 'valid-till date', but we don't have the data sources to provide this information.

Marc

We have updated the lat/lng for the US zip codes mixing together several sources from the US census.
Thanks to David from the MIT for his help.

Marc

Oh, I see. The full information is available with style=full:
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=bear,de&featureClass=P&style=full

Marc

Hi Vladimir

I have increased your user level.

We would be interesed in getting the Russian translation. We could then include it into the web services.

Best

Marc

The search result is ordered by relevancy.

I don't get the second point. The admin codes are included in the search service. Why do you need a second call?

Or would you prefer the geonameid instead of the admin code? There is another thread where a user is asking for the geonameid to be used for admin divs for which we don't have yet an admin code:
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/943.page
We could even go further then what the poster suggests and completely switch to the geonameid and use the admin code(s) as additional table.

Best

Marc

Joe

We would need a special permission from yahoo do include their result in our web service. Would you like to ask them?

Best

Marc

I suggest you use postgres/postgis instead of mysql.

Marc

Hi Grofzr

You can post them as attachment to the posting or send them to me and I will include them in the database, as long as the license allows us to do so.

Best

Marc