GeoNames Forum

Hi Alexey

Why don't you use GeoNames for the country lat/lng? (Hint : look for featurecodes PCLI.)

Cheers

Marc

Hi

The default value for places without any hits in the search engine was too high, I have changed this, but "St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut" is still not on top, 'Au' has more hits in the search engine.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Larry

I fixed these problems. let me know if there is anything else.

Cheers

Marc

Christophe

This was a missing feature. The service is now having the same I18N features as the children and the search service.

Regards

Marc

Check the documentation of your database system. Which algorithm you want to use depends on what you want to achieve and which database system you are using. There are some threads about implementing it in this forum and in the mailing list. Here one with MS SQL Server 2005: http://groups.google.com/group/geonames/browse_thread/thread/66c8368f2f72b5c2

Cheers

Marc

Hi Spax

The postal code information is from Swiss Post, they have two official entries in their file.
Some users have asked us to include both in our data set. You can ignore the one with 'Zustellung' if you don't like it (the same with 'Distribuzione' in Ticino, and 'Distribution' in the Romandie)

Cheers

Marc

I think America/Nassau for Miami and Tampa is a bug since the Bahamas are another country.

This is fixed and it returns "America/Kentucky/Monticello". It is just the geographically closest timezone name within the same country.

Cheers

Marc

Shaun has found a similar problem in this thread :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/570.page

Many of the countries he mentions are US dependencies like 'American Samoa' etc.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Shaun

I will fix the three countries with PCL. The others are related to the problem of dependent countries discussed in this thread : http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/562.page#2611

We have to find a way to handle this consistently. Please feel free to join the disussion.

Marc

Hi Yana

You can help us fix it. Go to the GeoNames web page for the 'Land'. Like here for Hessen :
http://www.geonames.org/2905330/land-hessen.html
Click on the "alternate names" link and add a new alternate name with the short name 'Hessen', add the language code 'de' and mark it as 'shortName'. Fixed. (It may take a moment to be visible on the web service, since they are different servers and it may take a minute or two for the synchronization to take place.)

Cheers

Marc

Dieser Datenbankzugriff hat ein Timeout gesetzt und wenn der Server überlastet ist wird die Suche nach Erreichen des Timeouts abgebrochen.

Marc

Hi Sami

The lat/lng data for Canada is from 'geobase.ca' an official source and the lat/lng are certainly correct.
We have several places with the name 'Saint Lambert'. What was wrong was the population for the first 'Saint Lambert' it is a small village and does not have 20.000 inhabitants. There was an mapping error when a GeoNames users sent us a list with population numbers from statcan and the wrong place has been updated.

On this faq page we have documented how we have mapped the feature codes used by geobase.ca to our feature codes :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/9.page

It cannot be excluded that there is an error in this mapping. In the original files we have the following feature codes ('terms') :

geoNameId 6138599 (the small village in the middle of nowhere) :
conciseTerm>Village
genericTerm>Municipalité de paroisse

geoNameId 6138603 :
conciseTerm>Unincorporated area
genericTerm>Secteur

geoNameId 6138601 :
conciseTerm>Geographical area
genericTerm>Paroisse

Marc

We have added two new features to the children web service.

1. An element 'numberOfChildren' indicating how many children each toponym has. This information is so far only available for administrative divisions. The numberOfChildren element makes is easier to implement navigation elements on top of this service.

2. We have started to add places (PPL, PPLA, PPLC) to the service when we have reached the last administrative level. You can now start with the Earth, navigate down the continents, countries, administrative divisions and go down to the city level.

As a next step we plan to go down to subsections of populated places (PPLX).

Marc

Hi

The parameter 'feedUrl' needs an uppercase 'U'.

Marc

We have just added Macedonian Postal codes. The data is from "Македонска пошта - Makedonska Posta" http://www.posta.com.mk/
Thanks to Aleksandar Velkovski for his help.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Yana

I have fixed it for Austria and German. The same problem exists for most administrative divisions and we are working on it.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Larry

I have fixed this as well. It had to do with the number of places starting with "Ber" and I had to rewrite the query.

Cheers

Marc

Guernsey, Jersey and Isle of Man have received their own ISO country codes some months back (spring 2006).
The question is how should we at GeoNames model these dependencies and how should the web services behave?

The search service returns places from Jersey and Guernsey as we have set the secondary countrycode (cc2) to 'GB', because users have asked us to return places from these islands even when explicitly searching with the country code 'GB'.
Should we change this and remove the secondary country code?

What is sure is that we have to find a conistent way of dealing with dependencies.

Cheers

Marc

The relationship city-> state is in the field 'admincode1' and the relation to county is in the field 'admincode2'. Relationships to lowerlevel administrative divisions if applicable are in the fields admincode3 and admincode4 respectivley.

hope this helps.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Fabrizio

The search service does this.

You can search for 'Capital, Italy' :
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=capital,italy

or also for 'Capital' with the countrycode :
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=capital&country=it

And to do it really right you could/should add the featureCode PPLC :

http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=capital&country=it&featureCode=PPLC

otherwise you might end up with some other city that has capital somewhere in its name like any city in Austrlia in the 'Australian Capital Territory'.

Cheers

Marc