Countries -> Regions/States -> Cities
champ1979
when a country is clicked, the region should be displayed (eg., if US,
states), and if a region is clicked, I'd like the cities to be
displayed--somewhat like TripAdvisor.
I tried to do this, but I ran into these issues:
- the region names are really long (for example, it says "State of
Arizona", and all I need is "Arizona")
- For some countries, the region names are too general (like West,
East, etc), and I would really skip this level for that country and go
one level more specific
- There seems to be 3 or 4 layers of locations before a "city" (as in
the informal sense) can be found.
If anybody has done this before, could you please share with me the
webservice method calls that you used?
Also, I came across another site that offers something similar
(MaxMind). I'm confused as to which one is more suitable (GeoNames or
MaxMind) to my needs mentioned above. Any thoughts?
Thanks!
Marc Wick
The 'children' service from the place hierarchy services does more or
less what you are looking for :
http://www.geonames.org/export/place-hierarchy.html
The service now returns the short names for the US states.
If you want to skip levels you will have to implement the service
yourself. GeoNames does not offer this functionality.
Marc
PS : For those following this thread on the mailing list there is also a
thread in the forum : http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/533.page
sethx1138
I now see why I couldn't edit the features. I should have been using
http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_<coordinates>.html instead of
http://www.geonames.org/maps/wikipedia-en.html. The former gives you
links to edit the geonames data, the latter doesn't.
Seth
Marc Wick
The latter are geocoded wikipedia articles, only the former are geonames
records. Wikipedia articles can be edited on the wikipedia site and they
are loaded onto geonames periodically.
You can switch between geonames records and wikipedia records with the
tabulators named 'geonames' and 'wikipedia' on the left of the map.
Marc
sethx1138
This hierarchical display of countries, regions, and cities in a web
site as mentioned by champ1979 seems like a potentially common use for
the Geonames data. In our site I implemented this capability using
the Geonames database dump, but it required a lot of work.
Basically, in our site the user can select a country, region, and city
from three separate menus. Upon selecting a country, the region menu
changes and upon selecting a region, the city menu changes. This was
further complicated by the fact that we offer these menus in English,
German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. Currently we have
this working for 14 countries: China, Japan, Spain, Germany, France,
Italy, Costa Rica, Mexico, Canada, United States, Peru, Brazil,
Argentina, and Venezuela.
Probably the biggest issue we had was that we wanted the menu options
to be the short names, but currently this is very incomplete in the
Geonames database dump. So we manually inserted or identified the
short names for the 14 countries and 356 corresponding regions for
most of the mentioned languages. At the city level this generally
isn't a problem, although there are many cities that have short and
long names.
We are willing to contribute this information to the Geonames data.
Is there any interest in this? Maybe we could do this through the
Geonames Wiki web interface, but when I am logged on to Geonames I see
how to create a new feature, but I can't determine how to modify an
existing feature. I've searched the forum and Google group, and read
the User Manual. Also, can I set the "isShortName" flag from this
interface?
Best regards,
Seth
Marc Wick
I have updated the manual with some screen shots about how to edit and
move a name and modify alternate names :
http://www.geonames.org/manual.html
You can set the IsShortName flag with the interface :
http://www.geonames.org/manual.html#alternateNames
Short names for administrative divisions really are an important
feature. It would be a fantastic contribution. Adding them manually via
the web interface is going to be a lot of work. If you have the
geonameId you can send me a file with geonameId, language code, name and
I can run a batch update.
Thanks a lot for your help.
Best regards
Marc