Jul 04 2008
Geonames Reverse Geocoding Web Services
I’ve been working on a ColdFusion application that will let me send my SPOT checkins to BrightKite. I’ve got the longitude and latitude down but one cool thing about BrightKite is that in addition to sending a checkin from a random lat/lon with “@lat,lon” you can give that place a name by appending a string to the end of it like “@lat,lon My House”
Well thanks to Geonames I can make my random lat/lon SPOT checkins a lot more interesting because they have a huge set of reverse geocoding web services. Reverse geocoding lets you take a latitude and longitude coordinate and then give figure out what it’s close to. With Geonames you can get the closest address, closest place name, closest neighborhood, or basically anything you want. So now I’m building in reverse geocode lookup into my application so I can check in with latitude and longitude coordinates but then give that a meaningful label.
