City/Country Names by GeoLocation

Question

How do I get the city and country names from the output of FindGeoLocation[] {lat, long} ?

This answer How do I plot coordinates (latitude and longitude pairs) on a geographic map? contains a related and useful function (nearLC) to find two nearest big cities (of population over 100000) for every geo-location point. — Artes, Jun 17 '13 at 21:38

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 17 '13 at 21:16

2

One way is to do this:

nc = Nearest[
  CityData[#, "Coordinates"] -> # & /@ 
     CityData[{All, "United Kingdom"}]];

Then use this as:

nc[FindGeoLocation[]]

{{"London", "GreaterLondon", "UnitedKingdom"}}

answered Jun 17 '13 at 21:16

cormullion

24,243
4
64
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(I'm in the UK - your mileage might vary... :)) – cormullion Jun 17 '13 at 21:17

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:35

The fastest is probably with the use of the GeoNames API*:

loc = FindGeoLocation[]
i = Import[
"http://api.geonames.org/findNearby?lat=" <> ToString[loc[[1]]] <> 
"&lng=" <> ToString[loc[[2]]] <> "&username=demo", "XML"];
name = Cases[i[[2, 3, 1, 3]], XMLElement["name", _, x_] -> x]

*Idea from this post.

EDIT: another option is the use of WolframAlpha plugin in mathematica:

WolframAlpha["near cities"]
(* or *)
= near cities

wolframalpha output

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 21 '22 at 10:04

1

Starting from Mathematica version 10.0 there is GeoIdentify function

GeoIdentify["Country", GeoPosition[{-11.00505177, -76.41350033}]]

Which results in

{Entity["Country", "Peru"]}

answered Oct 21 '22 at 10:04

Mykyta Kozlov

111
3

Of course you don't want to simply reproduce the Wolfram documentation, but it's worth pointing out that the first argument to GeoIdentify can be any one of a number of different kinds of entity, including "City". – High Performance Mark Oct 21 '22 at 10:25

City/Country Names by GeoLocation

3 Answers3