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Reverse Geocoding to City API

Introduction

Today, our smart devices can locate our geo-coordinates in real-time and with a high level of accuracy. But, these coordinates are often useless if you cannot identify the locality information such as country/state/city associated with them.

Reverse geocoding is a process that converts latitude and longitude to readable locality properties. Reverse geocoding is an essential component of the modern web, mobile and IoT. Its use cases vary across various industries and applications.  

  • Content Personalisation and Localisation
  • Geotargeting
  • Geofencing
  • Customer data validation
  • Fraud and security threat detection 

How is BigDataCloud’s Reverse Geocoding API different?

Existing reverse geocoding providers are trying to resolve to the closest street address, a household, for the given coordinates. As a result, the quality of data widely varies for mobile and regional users and exhibits slower response times.

Our Reverse Geocoding API is the first to deliver administrative/non-administrative boundaries-based results. Hence, the API is perfectly suitable for determining locality areas such as a suburb, city, state or country, rather than a street address, resulting in much faster response times and excellent support even for less populated areas. 

  • Unprecendly fast response time (sub-millisecond)
  • Delivers Administrative/non-administrative boundaries-based results
  • Provides detailed locality information of a user in 147 common world languages
  • Full postal code level accuracy for the US, Great Britain, and Australia (partial for other countries)

Get started

This API is part of the Reverse Geocoding package and is available in free and paid plans. Please visit the Reverse Geocoding package page for limits and pricing information.

Endpoints

IPv4 only API Endpoint

Use this endpoint to force API calls routed over the IPv4 network only

GET
https://api.bigdatacloud.net/data/reverse-geocode

Dual-Stack API Endpoint

This endpoint has native IPv6 support and backs the API calls routed over both IPv4 and IPv6 networks

GET
https://api-bdc.net/data/reverse-geocode

Request

Parameter
Type
Required
Description
Parameter
latitude
Type
number (double)
Required
Yes
Description
Latitude value as per WGS 84 reference system (GPS system). Expected values are in [-90, 90] range
Parameter
longitude
Type
number (double)
Required
Yes
Description
Longitude value as per WGS 84 reference system (GPS system). Expected values are in [-180, 180] range
Parameter
localityLanguage
Type
string
Required
Optional, default value: en
Description
Preferred language for locality names in ISO 639-1 format, such as 'en' for English, 'es' for Spanish etc. If the requested language is unavailable for a requested location, it will default to English. If no English variant is available, will provide the native, local names. Use 'default' as the requested value to automatically adjust the language to the first administrative language in the Country.
Parameter
key
Type
string
Required
Yes
Description
Your API key

Responses

Example query

https://api-bdc.net/data/reverse-geocode?latitude=-34.93129&longitude=138.59669&localityLanguage=en&key=[YOUR API KEY]
  

Example response

Schema

application/json