Ruby library for Geonames Web Services
Created by TouchBase Counsulting to support GIS processes for Carpool Connect. Inspired by the Geonames Java Client API library.
Install from the command line:
sudo gem install ruby-geonames
The following exercises several of the Geonames web services, full list of services.
Load the the geonames API
require 'geonames'
get list of places near by longitude/longitude location
places_nearby = Geonames::WebService.find_nearby_place_name 43.900120387, -78.882869834
p places_nearby
outputs:
[#<Geonames::Toponym:0x6c8c98 @population=nil, @geoname_id='6094578', @longitude=-78.849568878, @feature_class_name=nil, @country_name='Canada', @latitude=43.900120387, @feature_class='P', @country_code='CA', @name='Oshawa', @feature_code_name=nil, @elevation=nil, @distance=2.6679930307932, @alternate_names=nil, @feature_code='PPL'>]
get timezone for longitude/longitude location
timezone = Geonames::WebService.timezone 43.900120387, -78.882869834
p timezone
get country code for longitude/longitude location
country_code = Geonames::WebService.country_code 43.900120387, -78.882869834
p country_code
get country sub-division info for longitude/longitude location
country_subdivision = Geonames::WebService.country_subdivision 43.900120387, -78.882869834
p country_subdivision
get postal codes for a given location
postal_code_sc = Geonames::PostalCodeSearchCriteria.new
postal_code_sc.place_name = "Oshawa"
postal_codes = Geonames::WebService.postal_code_search postal_code_sc
p postal_codes
get nearby postal codes for a place name
postal_code_sc = Geonames::PostalCodeSearchCriteria.new
postal_code_sc.place_name = "Oshawa"
postal_codes_nearby = Geonames::WebService.find_nearby_postal_codes postal_code_sc
p postal_codes_nearby
Geonames uses 'en' as the default locale. You can change the requested language like this:
Geonames.lang = 'de'
In a Rails application, you could set the language from the I18n.locale:
Geonames.lang = I18n.locale
If you use the commercial service, you should put something like this in your configuration:
Geonames.username = 'username'
Geonames.base_url = 'http://ws.geonames.net'
In a Rails application, this could go into config/initializers/geonames.rb.
1. Adam Wisniewski
2. Nicolas Marchildon (elecnix)
3. Chris Griego