Getting what seems to be incorrect data from GeoNames?

Question

I have a hiking website. I am trying to query for parks big and small around the world where people could potentially go walking or hiking. I was trying to use the GeoNames data and was using query arguments from this table: http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html Here is an example query I made trying to get parks: http://api.geonames.org/search?maxRows=10&username=demo&q=PRK and it gives me some things which are I have no idea what. Here is also another thing where I try to query for arctic spaces: http://api.geonames.org/search?maxRows=10&username=demo&q=LAND And that gave places in the Caribbean :) So I must be doing something totally wrong. My goal was to look up all parks in the world, and also cities (with state/country info) so that I can make that connection on my site for my users. Is my goal possible to achieve? What was I doing wrong in my queries?

Answer 1

In your URL query string, use the parameter 'featureCode' instead of 'q' as PRK and LAND are feature codes. The reason you want to use the featureCode parameter instead is that the parameter q is not specific enough; it looks across all the attributes of a pace for a match (e.g., place name, country name, continent, admin codes) not just the features of the place. There are places that are not parks or arctic spaces that match PRK and LAND respectively which is why you get places that aren't parks or arctic zones. The correct queries becomes:

http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo

and

http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=LAND&maxRows=10&username=demo