GeoNames Forum

I fear there are some licence problems with the redistribution of the Mexican Postal codes.
The postal codes for Mexico are from the "Servicio Postal Mexicano" (sepomex) and they write :
no estando permitida su comercialización, total o parcial, ni su distribución a terceros bajo ningún concepto.

Hi Francesco

Great you can send it to my email address marc@geonames.org or simply add it as a attachment to the forum posting. Is it with the new codes of September 2006?

Cheers

Marc

Hi Julian

The empty codes '' mean we don't have information about the admin code. The problem is somehow related to this posting about superseded admin codes :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/398.page

As as quick fix I could implement a check in the dump procedure to set all not-existant admin codes to the empty code ''. This obviously is not a real fix but rather a workaround. The only thing we can do to try to fix it is use admin boundaries where they are available to determine the admin code.

Marc

Hi Alan

You are absolutely right. They should get the new admin code. What we can do is use boundary shape to determine the new code, but this will only work for countries where we have the new admin1 boundaries.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Isa

I personally would prefer the S.HSTS. If you put the term 'concentration camp' in the name or in an alternate name it is also searchable with the search term 'concentration camp' and it is also clear what it is. We could also start to put the tagging functionality of geonames to some use and tag it accordingly.

Marc

Hallo Philipp

Der service findNearbyPostalCodes is auf maximal 500 items beschränkt. Es gibt aber zwei Parameter die default Werte haben und damit auch beschränkend wirken können : maxRows und radius.

Gruss

Marc

The admin1 codes are the "Federal Information Processing Standards Codes" (FIPS). The codes without proper names in parenthesis have been superseded by new codes. For Togo this changed in March 2006 :

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/fips/FIPS10-4CN-10-d.pdf

Marc

Geonames.org is aggregating information from many sources this causes a lot of inconsistencies like the one between the two admin1Code files. The admin1Codes.txt will sooner or later be replace by the admin1CodesASCII.txt. The first is from a separate source and the second is generated from the geonames database.

I have changed the feature code in the geonames data base for the DC to ADM1 (from ADMD). It should therefore be in the admin1CodesASCII file with the next dump (in a couple of hours)

Cheers

Marc

Hi Pieter

The second query is problematic since a huge area is covered and all places in this area have to be sorted by distance to the given lat/lng.
I have added a max radius restriction of 300km to protect the server from being overloaded by this type of query. If your application really needs we can speak about it and see how it could be perfomance-optimized on the server side.

Cheers

Marc

Only utf8 encoding is not sufficient. It also needs to be url encoded. Something like this :

rawurlencode(utf8_encode($input))

The result should look like this :
http://dev.geonames.org/search?name_equals=Ry%C5%AB%C5%8D

Regards

Marc

Hi Julian

The timezone field is populated by the timezone by lat/lng service, but there was a bug and it did not run for the latest batch imports. I have ran the service now and most places have now a timezone.

Marc

Hi Alex

I am afraid I don't know anything about Navicat. You should try reading the documentation for Navicat or use the mysql tool 'load data'.
What is a little bit strange for point 6 is to ask for a source table if you want to do a file import.

Cheers

Marc

Hi

The problem for Northern Ireland is not only the lack of place names, the main problem is that there is no free postal code list available.

Marc

Hi Pieter

You can use the parameter 'maxRows' to get more than the default 10 rows.

Regards

Marc

The Czech Republic has the following administrative divisions :

ADM1 : Kraje (14)
ADM2 : Okresy (77)

Not yet integrated in geonames.org :

ADM3 : Obce (6248 )

Hi Nick

Isn't the $xmlair already the root element of the document? Did you try without the 'geonames' part and directly reference the 'geoname' element?

like this :$xmlair->geoname->lng
(instead of $xmlair->geonames->geoname->lng)

Regards

Marc

Thanks Dan.

Marc

There is a login link in the top right corner of the web page :
http://www.geonames.org/ (the login link is not available on the forum pages)
Click on the link and then fill out the second form to create an account.

Marc

Hi Francesco

There are two ways how you can help fix errors and add missing information.

1. You can update it on our website. Click on the edit link on the info window on top of the maps display and correct the error. Some modifications require a login to protect the data against vandals. You can see the latest modifications here : http://www.geonames.org/recent-changes.html

2. If you have a lot of modifications you can send me a file with the corrected or missing information (csv or spreadsheed) and I run a batch update.

The export is daily, modifications will be in the dump file on the next day.

Cheers

Marc

Postal Codes for Bulgaria have been added to the geonames.org postal code data base these days. The postal codes are also available as alternate names for the respective cities.

Thanks to Roman Rachkov who did most of the work.

Marc