Gazetteer Services

The CGDI provides several gazetteer services to developers:

1. The Postal Code Lookup Service, which finds geographic regions based on Canadian postal codes;
   
   
2. The CGDI Place Name Lookup Service, which finds all places in Canada that match the place name in the request;
   
   
3. The Canadian Geographical Name Service Place Name Gazetteer, which provides feature information for specific Canadian geographic locations;
   
   
4. The Canadian Geographical Name Service Server, a web feature service, which provides feature information for specific geographic locations;
   
   
5. The National Topographic System Lookup Service returns geometries for known NTS map sheet identifiers, or it returns NTS map sheet identifiers for given geometries; and
   
   
6. The World Place Name Gazetteer which enables you to perform a global search by place name or by place name, state/country or place name, state and country.

Each CGDI gazetteer service has three functional interfaces:

1. GetCapabilities, which is used to request a capabilities document that describes the service’s functionality; the response includes a list of feature types and identifies the vocabulary supported by the gazetteer.
   
   
2. GetFeature, which supports filter-based queries as well as the following operations:
   
   

   “PropertyIsEqualTo” (against all properties); The “Inside” spatial operator with a box geometry; The AND, OR conditional operators.

3. DescribeFeatureType, which provides a client the means to request a definition of any feature type the gazetteer can provide; the result is a feature collection that may include broader, narrower, and related terms in GML format.

For an overview of CGDI gazetteer services, click Gazetteer summary.