World Places Locator
Collection: World
Service Name: ESRI_Places_World
This locator enables you to geocode various types of places around the world. This locator references a geodatabase of more than 14 million places around the world that includes countries, states and provinces, administrative areas (for example, counties), cities, landmarks, water bodies, and more.
The geodatabase is built primarily using the GeoNames Data that is accessible via Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License through www.geonames.org. Esri has assembled selected records from the May 2011 GeoNames Data and appended additional attributes (for example, description, rank, bounding coordinates, and so on) for use in this locator.
You may contribute to the future content of this locator by submitting or editing place names through GeoNames.
The locator accepts a single-line place name input (for example, Paris, or Paris, France, or Washington, DC) and returns candidates sorted by match score and rank. This locator can be used to geocode single places.
The data used in the service is in Geographic Coordinate System (GCS) WGS84.
Attribution: Source: Esri, GeoNames
Directory Size: 2.42 GB
Number of Files: 3
Technical Notes:-
Candidate sorting: Candidate results are
sorted using multiple fields in the following sequence:
- Match Score (Score): Beginning with full match of 100 and proceeding down to the minimum match score.
- Rank (Rank): Beginning with rank of 1 for most prominent places and proceeding up to 99 for less prominent places.
- Shape: Geometry of the output.
- Score: A value assigned to all potential candidates of an address match. The match score is based on how well the location found in the reference data matches with the address being searched.
- Name: Name of the place
- Type: Type of place (for example, Populated Place, Hill, Farm, Administrative Division, Amusement Park, and so on). There are several hundred unique types in the database. The type field can be used to filter out some candidates you don't want to present to a user.
- Rank: Indicates the relative prominence of the place and can be used for sorting. The rank field is based on the place type and, in some cases, its population. The values range from 1 for the most prominent places (for example, countries) up to 100 for less prominent places (for example, points of interest). Candidates returned from the service are not always sorted by rank, so you can re-sort candidates by rank if you prefer.
- Match_addr: The corresponding address in the reference data for the candidate point
- Descr: Includes a full description of the place that typically includes its name, type, and the administrative area in which it is located. This is typically the field you would want to display to users for candidates. The ArcGIS Locator currently returns the values in all capitals so you may want to convert the text to title casing (capitalize first letter only) before presenting in a list to users. The locator separately returns several fields used in building the description (for example, Name, Type, City, State, Country), so you can assemble your own custom description if you prefer.
- City: Name of the candidate city
- County: Name of the candidate county or administrative unit
- State: Name of the candidate state or administrative unit
- State_Abbr: Abbreviation for the candidate state or administrative unit
- Country: Name of the candidate country
- Cntry_Abbr: Abbreviation for the candidate country
- Latitude: Latitude of candidate point
- Longitude: Longitude of candidate point
- Bounding Coordinates: The four bounding coordinates for a place (that is, North_Lat, South_Lat, West_Lon, East_Lon) are returned for candidates. These can be used to navigate the map to an area surrounding the place (for example, map extent of California rather than centroid point). For some features (for example, administrative divisions, countries, states, counties, ZIP codes), these extents were derived from a polygon features. In other cases (for example, points of interest), these extents were approximated by buffering the point location by an average extent.