The geonames.org server changed / geonames package
2009/1/23 Tomislav Hengl <T.Hengl at uva.nl>:
Hi Barry, Edzer, Just to let you know that geonames.org server changed from "ws.geonames.org" to "ws5.geonames.org" See the info at: http://www.geonames.org/export/ Maybe you should add to your R package "geonames" an option to specify the server name manually, e.g.: setGNserver <- "ws5.geonames.org"
Ouch! Thanks for that. The domain name is only in one place in the code, but I never thought they'd change it! They say it's only temporary so maybe it'll be changed back before I get round to implementing an option.
PS: Does anybody know more about how to utilize the Google maps services in R (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html)? (i.e. to get the same type of output as in the case of geonames.org). These need to be combined with some Java script or similar right? My idea is to automate the way to save an image shown in Google maps (e.g. as TIF), then obtain the bounding coordinates, import to a GIS and use the image (high res satellite imagery) as a GIS layer.
I'd watch google's copyright on map images if you do that... The problem is that a google map isn't a single image, but a number of tiles and overlays that are made into a full map using javascript in the browser. You can get the map tiles easily enough: http://khm1.google.com/kh?v=35&hl=en&x=3&y=5&z=4 I think google don't make it easy (for example, by providing their imagery as a WMS server) on purpose. Barry