Admin city populator broken for large countries

[jeffwarnica]

See #941 and #670. Opening a new issue as I think I've got the problem understood as a general case.

When a geographically "large" country is selected, the Geonames service will return 0 results.

It seems the root of the problem is that the (free to use) API just gives up when you give it a large "bounding box". One gets what they pay for, I guess. I would suggest that an alternative method would be to not search based on some well known geographical description of the country selected, but to search for cities based on the current previewed map.

[rjmackay]

@jeffwarnica searching on the current map view would likely have the same issues for any maps using a wide initial zoom.
We might have to look at using a different source..

[jeffwarnica]

True, though if/when you get 0 results back you could offer the suggestion
that the search area may be too big. From a map based search, the user can
fix this. At least if their target area is small enough to get free results
for.
On 2013-01-03 5:38 PM, "Robbie MacKay" notifications@github.com wrote:

@jeffwarnica https://github.com/jeffwarnica searching on the current
map view would likely have the same issues for any maps using a wide
initial zoom.
We might have to look at using a different source..

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/979#issuecomment-11862040.

[rjmackay]

I'm just wondering if we can pull a location list from OSM (maybe Nominatim http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim) since then it would match what users see on the map too.

or maybe just parse the full Geonames data dumps http://www.geonames.org/export/

[rjmackay]

I think the quick solution here is to use something like:

http://www.overpass-api.de/api/xapi?node[bbox=68.11,20.12,74.48,24.71][place=city]
Note that Overpass expects the bbox as west,south,east,north

source: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/13872/how-to-find-list-of-cities-in-a-state-with-overpass-osm-api

Though it would probably make sense to source the bounding box from OSM too rather than using a mix of geonames and OSM

[rjmackay]

#985 should fix this issue by switching to us OSM as data source.

Please try it out.