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That query returns three interpretations. This level of restriction to "TOWN" isn't enough on its own, because there are many places around the world with the same names (Boston, MA and Boston, Linconlshire, England; Erie, PA and Erie, IL) There is logic that is captured in the legacy geocoder module in addition to the Ingestion 2 coarse_geocode module that we will need to be aware of when reworking geocoder. Both of these modules are careful, when given a place name, to consider any existing coordinate data that may appear in the record to weed out false results for geographic features that are not applicable. They are also careful to weight results, for example, in the case where we're given nothing by a town name from an American archive's metadata. In this case, we'll weight the candidate interpretations in favor of United States locations.
Twofishes Suitability For Our Purpose
A basic Twofishes reverse query (e.g. "somerville ma") gives us everything we need, including coordinates and what we have always viewed as the canonical GeoNames hierarchy of feature names, with "name" and "display name" properties, e.g. "Somerville", "Middlesex County", "Massachusetts", and "United States".
You can use "WOE Types" (where on earth types) to narrow a search, e.g. to ask for "Hanford" as the name of a town (woe type 7) as distinct from "Hanford Site," but it tends to default to the most-specific one, e.g. for "tulare" it only gives one "interpretation" for Tulare, CA, not Tulare County. With Twofishes's maxInterpretations parameter you can ask for multiple interpretations (where, in the example, you'd get Tulare, CA in addition to Tulare County, CA), but you can also narrow your results by providing the woeRestrict parameter, for instance, to limit the interpretations to WOE type "TOWN."
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http://geo-prod:8081/?query=tulare&responseIncludes=PARENTS,DISPLAY_NAME&lang=en&maxInterpretations=3&woeRestrict=TOWN |
This level of restriction isn't enough on its own, because there are many places around the world with the same names (Boston, MA and Boston, Linconlshire, England; Erie, PA and Erie, IL) There is logic that is captured in the legacy geocoder module in addition to the Ingestion 2 coarse_geocode module that we will need to be aware of when refactoring geocoder. Both of these modules are careful, when given a place name, to consider any existing coordinate data that may appear in the record to weed out false results for geographic features that are not applicable. They are also careful to weight results, for example, in the case where we're given nothing by a town name from an American archive's metadata. In this case, we'll weight the candidate interpretations in favor of United States locations.