[OSGeo-UK] Unlock - EDINA's gazetteer and geoparser services

[Tim Waters]

Hi Jo,


2009/12/8 Jo Walsh <jo.walsh at ed.ac.uk>:
> dear all,
>
> EDINA recently re-launched a set of web services that provide
>
>  * gazetteer functions, placename and feature type search,
>   returning points, bounding boxes or footprints:
>   http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/places.html
>  * automatic extraction and georeferencing of placenames from free text:
>   http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/text.html
>
> EDINA makes Ordnance Survey GB's data available for research and teaching
> through the Digimap platform - http://edina.ac.uk/digimap
> If you're attached to an academic body that has a subscription
> to the Digimap OS Collection, you can register for an Unlock API key
> and use the place search based on OS data sources - the 1:50K gazetteer,
> BoundaryLine, Meridian2, CodePoint and extracts from MasterMap.
>
> Unlock Places also provides an open data alternative with global coverage
> based on geonames.org - taking daily database updates from geonames and
> encouraging Scottish archival projects to contribute back. Geonames-based
> gazetteer is made available as an open, public service.
...
> I'm also very interested in getting more feedback on the text parser from
> people who have been working with alternatives (such as Yahoo! PlaceMaker -
> http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/ )

This is very interesting, as I'm doing a comparison of placemaker /
geoparser / geodoc at the moment!


I kept on getting errors "Error executing command-line application "
when I saved and then uploaded a html document.
However, when I copied and pasted the text into a text file, and
uploaded that, i got "Incorrect number of parameters" for xml output
(The JSON and KML seemed to work though)

Will the API allow a user to specify a url for a remote file?

I'll look forward to incorporating this into my evaluation :)

Cheers,

Tim