On 06/10/10 14:03, Mark Goodge wrote:
I'm currently building an application which will need to use reverse
geocoding - that is, starting with geographic location data and/or
postcodes and returning a human-readable placename. There are several
ways of doing that, via both downloadable datasets of APIs, but none of
them seem to address a particular issue I have, which is that I need to
know the type of location and return the appropriate level of placename.
That is, for locations in rural areas and villages, I want the village
or hamlet name, but for locations in towns or cities I want the
town/city name rather than the district within it.
I'm currently working on something similar which will effectively be an
API which makes a call to Mapit (either the MySociety one or a local
install) and then adds place name data.
For example, for M13 9PL you might get back:
[mapit data]
placename: { area: "Manchester", country: "England" }
The place name data is pulled from a database which has columns like this:
Postcode Regex | Area | Country
-------------------------------------
M13 * | Manchester | England
The hard part is populating the place name database - I'm aiming to
scrape wikipedia for the post towns to begin with and then gradually
refine the results over time.
Paul
--
Paul Waring
http://www.pwaring.com
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