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World Places Locator

Service Name: ESRI_Places_World

Description: This locator enables you to geocode various types of places around the world. This locator references a geodatabase of morth than 12 million places around the world that includes countries, states and provinces, administrative areas (e.g., 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 March 2010 GeoNames Data and appended additional attributes (e.g., description, rank, bounding coordinates, etc.) 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 (e.g., 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 or batch geocode.

Attribution: Source: ESRI, GeoNames

Directory Size: 6.97 GB

Number of Files: 14

Technical Notes:

• Locators: The World Places Locator is a composite locator that references three locators:
  • Place_Name: Used for finding individual place names (e.g., Paris, Disneyland, 90210).
  • Place_Admin: Used for finding place names within administrative areas (e.g., Disneyland, California).
  • Place_City_Admin: Used for finding place names within cities (e.g., Baja, Haiti)
• Candidate sorting: Candidate results are sorted using multiple fields in the following sequence:
  1. Locator Name (Loc_name): Sorted in order of individual locators in composite locator: (a) Place_Name, (b) Place_Admin, (c) Place_City_Admin.
  2. Match Score (Score): Beginning with full match of 100 and proceeding down to the minimum match score.
  3. 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 a place match. The match score is based on how well the location found in the reference data matches with the place being searched.
• Name: Name of the place
• Rank: Indicates the relative prominence of the places 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 (e.g., countries) up to 100 for less prominent places (e.g., points of interest). Candidates returned from the service are not always be 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 (e.g., Name, Type, City, State, Country), so you can assemble your own custom description if you prefer.
• Latitude: Latitude of candidate point
• Longitude: Longitude of candidate point
• City: Name of the candidate city
• 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
• Country_Abbr: Abbreviation for the candidate country
• Type: Type of place (e.g., Populated Place, Hill, Farm, Administrative Division, Amusement Park, etc.). 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.
• Bounding Coordinates: The four bounding coordinates for a place (i.e., 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 (e.g., map extent of California rather than centroid point). For some features (e.g., administrative divisions, countries, states, counties, ZIP codes), these extents were derived from a polygon features. In other cases (e.g., points of interest), these extents were approximated by buffering the point location by an average extent.