smartmet-engine-geonames

April 3, 2026 · View on GitHub

Part of SmartMet Server. See the SmartMet Server documentation for a full overview of the ecosystem.

Overview

The geonames engine (also called geoengine) provides shared location services to SmartMet Server. It resolves place names to coordinates and vice versa, using a PostGIS database based on the GeoNames geographical database with over eleven million place names.

Configuration

The configuration file consists of the configuration of several parameters that are needed for specifying the location services. These parameter include the following:

Station names

This configuration states whether the station names should be splittable into words or not. For example,


remove_underscores = true;

Locale

Locale defines the user's format for the specification of language. This link gives the GNU document on locale for C and C++. In the configuration file, we can specify for example the locale for Finnish language as


locale = "fi_FI.UTF-8";

Using en_US would mean the characters Ä and A would be considered equivalent. The language used affects the autocomplete feature.

maxdemresolution for the data


maxdemresolution = 0;

The setting of 0 meters allow highest possible resolution. Do not use too high resolution data to avoid page faults

LandCover data directory


landcoverdir = "directory_name";

Database settings

Do NOT use the full name, use the alias only because different networks use different full host names but the same alias.


database:
{
        host     = "localhost";
        user     = "username";
        database = "databasename";
        pass     = "password";

};

Cache Maximum size


cache:
{
       max_size        = cache size in bytes;
};

Automatic enginen reload tietokannan muutosten case


autoreload:
{
       period        = period in minutes;
};

Default 0 means - autoreload is disabled

Priorities

Priorities specify the priorities of countries, priorities of areas within a country, priorities of features and priorities of country specific features.

Use some criteria to prioritize the countries. The priority index along with the country code from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes is given in the configuration file.


priorities: 
{
      FI = priority index;        // Finland
      EE = priority index;       // Estonia
      SE = priority index;       // Sweden
      ...
      default = 100000;
   };

Feature priorities

Feature priority for a particular region or country


 {
        default = "default_features";
        FI      = "FI_features"; // specific features for Finland
   };
   default_features:
   {
	PPLC    = priority index;  // populated place
        SKI     = priority index;  // skiing place
	...

   };

Country specific features


FI_features:
   {
	PPLC    = priority index;  // populated place
        SKI     = priority index;  // skiing place
	...
    };

Areas

Priorities of areas within a country


   areas:
   {
        Area1 = 2;
        Area2    = 1;
	...

        default  = 0;
   };

Countries


   countries:
   {
        FI = priority index;
        SE = priority index;
        NO = priority index;
        ...

	default = 0;
   };

smartmet-engine-geonames

Overview

Configuration

Docker

License

Contributing