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.

Add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'ruby-geonames'

And run:

bundle install

Or 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.password = 'password'
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)
2. Rahul Ghose (rghose)