GeoNames: Wikipedia For Geographical Data

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1. Zoltan Szendro
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

   As far as I know, they are the only free web service providing zip code lookup from coordinates. Very valuable service for mapping applications.

2. Andrew
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

   This is great. Years ago I paid $5 for a list of ALL us zips codes and their lat/lon values to do a zip code distance search. I have seen lost the data I paid $5 for! But I still have the SQL:

   SELECT ‘%s’ as member, a.id, %s, a.address1, a.city, a.state, a.zip, ROUND(
   (ACOS(
   (SIN(c.lat) * SIN(a.lat)) +
   (COS(c.lat) * COS(a.lat) *
   COS(a.lon - c.lon))
   )
   )
   * 3963,1
   ) AS distance
   FROM zip c, %s a
   where c.zip = ‘%s’ %s
   ORDER BY distance, a.firm

3. wayne lambright
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 7:50 pm

   Hi Zoltan,

   Since they are offering zip code lookups for coordinates, do they have an api the pump’s back this data?

   Thanks

4. the logo homepage
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

   the figures are impressive

5. Peter
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

   This data is really cool, you can download it and import it into Google Earth and everything is labeled in detail.

   I used coordinates from a different site, but you should get a similar effect.

6. Steve S
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 10:06 pm

   I was just about to ask if you could move the data into places like Google Earth. This is a fantastic little service. If they have an API then it also has some really interesting mashup potential.

7. Zoltan Szendro
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

   Here is the link to the API: http://www.geonames.org/export/#ws

   Clean, easy-to-use REST API with JSON and XML result types.

   Some of their other unique services are: Elevation by coordinates, RSS to GeoRSS geocoding, nearby Wikipedia entries. Definitely useful for mashups.

8. Oh no what have TC done?
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 11:21 pm

   In the future years, U.S government won’t look into your porn datas.

   But Your great great grand or future children will look back your dna data to find out if you went to porn sites. They want to know why they were born mixed.

   Agggghhhh!!!!! people can’t get out of this thing. oh fu*k…. The servers keep records about you.

   Thanks alot mike for bring pornotube! This is embrassassing…
   Kids will find out if you actually jerk off porn sites.

   This is all your faults…

   I’m converting to christian forever!!!

9. JLumb
   

   May 26th, 2007 at 11:47 pm

   http://www.Postcodeanywhere.co.uk provide a very library of web services. I have just integrated their International address finder into our site, demo here:

   http://www.postcodeanywhere.co.....tform.aspx

   From what I can see it works pretty well, however, it’s not free…

10. max
    

    May 27th, 2007 at 12:40 am

    Few years ago I built an application for address parsing and resolution for New Zealand based on data from New Zealand Post and government Land Information database. The DB was quite comprehensive, but incomplete. The idea was to make it learn from user input. It was a good beginning, but my business partner made it with the money and I haven’t heard from him since.

    Yesterday I had to make an emergency call to the Fire Service. I was standing on top of a ridge some 30km from the town. Now try explain to a non-local where you are in that situation and where the smoke is coming from.

    Postal addresses and ZIP codes are peanuts compared to the way we use to explain locations and navigating in every day life. Even in town.

    You ain’t going to say “such and such number / street, level 2″ about a music store. You are most likely to say “A music shop opposite BigMac on High street, somewhere upstairs next to Dymocks bookshop”.

    There is a big opportunity for a self-learning address and place name resolution system. Google, MS and Yahoo place name resolution suck.

    Anyone to revive my project ?

11. fluencev
    

    May 27th, 2007 at 2:03 am

    i love free sites,but almost i dont care wheater it is free.
    it no matter!
    JLumb said perfect!

12. dribller
    

    May 27th, 2007 at 3:21 am

    it looks preety nice…

13. Nick Tan
    

    May 27th, 2007 at 6:04 am

    Interesting. It’s a great start, and kudos to them for making it available for free. This is actually the sort of thing that potentially would cull thousands of man-hours from our workload. But unfortunately - and understandably, given the scale of their project - the quality of the localization is not up to our standards, so we will continue building our own database, one country at a time.

14. Jonathan
    

    May 27th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    Our API in Faces allows you to query the same data - we have 8.5 Million places including postal codes, landmarks, man made objexts, mountains lakes, etc etc, the API allows you to ask for the distance between two points, notable things in close proximity to an object and GPS coordinates of all of them.

    http://www.faces.com/Edit/API/GettingStarted.aspx

    You can see some of it in operation at http://www.cleantag.com The Best Geotagging Software for adding Google Earth GPS coordinates to Flickr and faces photos

15. Niko Neugebauer
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    Seems to a very useful application =O)