Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 7, Names and Places

#84 Build a Free World Gazetteer

HACK

The Web Interface

You can try out this simple gazetteer at http://mappinghacks.com/cgi-bin/

gazetteer.cgi. Try typing a place name into the search box. Figure 7-6 shows

the results of a sample search. You can search for an exact match, or you can

match from the start or the end of the name. An option to filter results by

country is available. You should see any matches for your place name, along

with the country it’s in, the feature type of the place, and an approximate

GPS reference for it.

The gazetteer responds to simple GET requests. You can add

query=place to

look for a place name, and filter by asking for

country=ISO code. This will

only return exact matches for the name; optionally, you can try a fuzzy

match from the start or the end of your query by appending

match=start or

match=end to the URL. This gazetteer also has a simple machine-readable

output. The following URL, with

format=rdf appended to the end, will

return the same data in easy-to-parse XML:

http://mappinghacks.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?query=London&country=UK&format=rdf

How does this gazetteer work? It is built from a source of free data known as

GEOnet, published by the U.S. government’s National Geospatial Intelli-

gence Agency, formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. It pro-

vides coverage of interesting places—not just populated places, but hydro

features, ...