Unlock places
Unlock the potential of the geographic information in your data.
Unlock places is a digital gazetteer service. Given a place name, it will return a geographic location and a suggested 'type' for the place. Look up a name with a simple HTTP GET request. Get back the results in HTML, XML / KML format (for viewing in a mapping client), in GeoJSON (for use in a Javascript based web application), GeoRSS or plain-text. Searches for names can be limited to a particular space, or filtered by the type of feature.
Try a quick place name search!
Unlock places is a "gazetteer service" rather than simply a gazetteer - it provides an interface to many sources of gazetteer data. The links below will help you to get started.
Getting Started Guide|API Documentation|Map Viewer
|Example Queries|Example Code|FAQ|Feature Type Thesaurus
Open Data
Anyone is free to use the open data version of our service, based on open data from Ordnance Survey and geonames.org. GeoNames provides point-based location data for millions of placenames worldwide. We synchronise with the latest GeoNames data every day.
Additional Ordnance Survey Data
In addition to the Ordnance Survey Open data, for academic use within the UK we offer a gazetteer based on richerOrdnance Survey data sources. This has improved feature coverage, and includes detailed footprints for post codes, not simply approximate points. This data is accessible to UK academia through Digimap Collections. You need an API key to use the Ordnance Survey gazetteer, and can register for one through Digimap Collections.
Notice:
Tuesday evenings between 17.30 and 18.30 are 'at risk' periods for Digimap and Unlock services, which means there may be a risk that the services are unavailable during that hour.
