This package aims to bring you close to a ready-usable area search for existing "addresses" within a given distance from a starting point.
This was developed for germany, where any place has a zip-code. We wanted to have a search functionality to find objects that are "close" (i.e. within a defined distance) to a given location.
You could also use any other key which points to coordinates with little effort. The only requirement is that the key is unique.
For this, zip codes are the best available solution for us. We have a free list of zip codes and corresponding gis information for germany (see data directory). This list is from the opengeodb project and licensed as public domain: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengeodb/