geonames_rdf 0.2.3

Query data from geonames.org and return RDF/Semantic Web data.

Introduction

This is a client library for the Geonames RDF-compatible web-services. At this time, only the Search API provides RDF responses and is, therefore, the only adapter available.

RDF is often used in association with the Semantic Web and/or the IoT.

Requirements

• requests

• Python 2.x or 3.x

Installation

Via PyPI:

$ sudo pip install geonames_rdf

Usage

As a library:

import geonames.adapters.search

_USERNAME = 'your_username'
sa = geonames.adapters.search.Search(_USERNAME)

result = sa.query('detroit').country('us').max_rows(5).execute()
for id_, name in result.get_flat_results():
    # make_unicode() is only used here for Python version-compatibility.
    print(geonames.compat.make_unicode("[{0}]: [{1}]").format(id_, name))

When used as a library, a result object will be returned from the execute() method. The following are the ways to read the results (get_flat_results is used above):

• The raw lxml object is exposed through the xml property.

• The get_xml_nodes method will return a list of Feature lxml.etree objects from the resulting document, representing each of the results.

• The get_flat_results method will simply yields a list of (id, name) 2-tuples if you’re not interested in anything else. This is also what’s returned, by default, from the command-line utility.

As a command-line utility:

$ gn_search dsoprea -p query detroit -p country us -p max_rows 5
[http://sws.geonames.org/4990729/]: [Detroit]
[http://sws.geonames.org/6955112/]: [Detroit-Warren-Livonia]
[http://sws.geonames.org/5024238/]: [Detroit Lakes Airport]
[http://sws.geonames.org/4990733/]: [Detroit City Airport]
[http://sws.geonames.org/4990742/]: [Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport]

You may only provide string (non-boolean) parameters to the command-line utility.

NOTE: You can also get the complete RDF response by passing the “-x” parameter.

Whether you’re using the library or the tool, the parameters that are available are:

Library Parameter Name	API Parameter Name
query	q
place_name_like	name
place_name_equals	name_equals
place_name_starts_with	name_startsWith
max_rows	maxRows
start_row	startRow
country	country
show_country_first	countryBias
continent	continentCode
admin_code1	adminCode1
admin_code2	adminCode2
admin_code3	adminCode3
feature_class	featureClass
feature_code	featureCode
population_class	cities
language	lang
verbosity	style
force_matching_name	isNameRequired
tag	tag
operator	operator
charset	charset
fuzzy	fuzzy
east_west_north_south_box	east,west,north,south
place_name_language	searchlang
order_by	orderby

Some of the parameters can be specified more than once. See the API documentation for more information.

Design Notes

• Note that most of the parameters in the library are named differently from the API. Normally this goes against my policy, but I found so many of the parameters to be ambiguous or cryptic that I renamed those parameters to be clearer and just renamed the rest to underscore-separated naming while I was at it.

• We mostly rely on the API to correctly validate against bad parameters. We don’t like arbitrarily validating parameters in the client since the rules may change in the server and it’s one more thing that might interfere with your implementation. However, if there is a type of validation that, for one reason or another, makes sense and/or would make things easier to develop against, let me know.