Showing the county besides the state

[RedAnarchy]

Since there are some challenge caches where you have to find a cache in specific regions, it would be great, if the cache description would have a field for the county of that cache, maybe combined with the state field. The loading time would be increased, but maybe even a button somewhere in the description would be fine. Something like a "get county value now" or something like that. This will cause an extra loading time just when i'm interested in that value.

A feature like that would increase the chance to find a cache with a specific county near the borders of the counties, especially outside cities, where nobody knows, what county that forest or field is belonging to.

[Lineflyer]

Similar to #4457

[jakedot]

Where would we get this info from? Project GC has it, but I don't believe they are allowed to give API access to it given that they comply with GS policies.

[RedAnarchy]

GSAK / FindStatsGen3 has also these Infos, don't know exactly where they get it from, but it seems they receive it from several sources.

[RedAnarchy]

https://gsak.net/help/hs23730.htm

It seems that polygon files are necessary to identify the counties. That would increase the app size or the network traffic. So i think, a field that is shown always would be bad. But maybe these files are anywhere online, so maybe it would be possible to synchronize a list or the saved offline caches with a button to get counties for a selection of caches

[jakedot]

If it's realized by polygon data, maybe the Project GC team does have an API for those. As the data isn't geocache related, it should not infringe on Groundspeak copyright/licensing

[Lineflyer]

As stated above, see #4457. This can be realized by a reverse geocoding service/API. No idea however if there is any free to use API available on the net.

[Lomanic]

There is Geonames, but cgeo will easily exhaust its free daily/hourly tokens.

There's also Nominatim, similarly it has big limitations (no more than 1 call per second), though it's possible to self-host, but hardware requirements can be really big for a full planet.

LocationIQ can respond to 10000 requests per day (2/sec, 60/min) for free. That looks more feasible for cgeo.

Finally, there's BigDataCloud Free reverse geocoding API for clients, but from my test the returned data is a bit weird compared to Nominatim for example. Also, in the "Don'ts", it's forbidden to "apply the API on stored geo-coordinates values from a file", so it couldn't be used on a cache (list) refresh (though it should be OK to indefinitely cache this information locally?).

[jakedot]

I don't think the discussion about changing the city when setting final coordinates is very useful. if anything matters, then it will be the location that shows up in statistics such as PGC, and it will usually be about the header coordinates anyway - PGC are a kind of authority on that matter being the only org administering the challenge checkers etc where this will be relevant. That's why I'd prefer querying an API of theirs to using an off-the-shelf geocoding service.

[jakedot]

they do have an API for this. I just remembered the userscript they offer for geocaching.com which replaces the country/state by country/state/county on the listing pages. https://project-gc.com/Home/UserScript - https://github.com/magma1447/greasemonkey-geocaching-projectgc

[wolverine007]

Hi,

seems that this feature is requested since several years already.
What happend to the beta version @Bananeweizen posted in his draft in 2014?

Out in the wild there are several pages displaying all the data we need.
For example https://www.mapcoordinates.net/en - enter a location und you will receive Country, County, City.
If you move the marker around you will also receive the sealevel/elevatoin of that location.

Maybe such an existing implementation could be adopted by on of your script gurus?

Project-GC has been mentioned as well - guess they are storing all this information inside their own database.
Maybe a cooperation between Project-GC and c:geo is possible to just grab the data from their database instead of doig things twice via our own solution.

Just my two cents to push this topic up the ladder... ;)

Cheers,
wolv

[moving-bits]

if I'm reading the info about the PGC script correctly, it needs a paid membership with them to be able to retrieve the data requested.

A different approach could be to use GADM data, which is free for non-profit use. Technically it's a sqlite database, which could be downloaded and queried against by c:geo