Get street address at lat/long pair

Question

I've seen that it's possible to get the latitude and longitude (geocoding, like in Google Maps API) from a street address, but is it possible to do the reverse and get the street address when you know what the lat/long already is?

The application would be an iPhone app (and why the app already knows lat/long), so anything from a web service to an iPhone API would work.

Answer 1

Google again

http://nicogoeminne.googlepages.com/documentation.html

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/web/resources-non-google-geocoders

Answer 2

This is called "reverse geocoding", and there do exist web services that will provide this functionality.

I'd urge being wary of the quality, scaling, and reliability of free services, but here's a place to start: http://www.geonames.org/export/reverse-geocoding.html

Answer 3

The answers for this similar question may help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30962/finding-city-and-zip-code-for-a-location

Answer 4

Google now supports reverse geocoding in both JavaScript API and webservice over HTTP. Request looks like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?output=xml&oe=utf-8&ll=LAT,LON&key=API_KEY

Note, you must change LAT to latitude, LON to longitude and API_KEY to be you Google Maps API key. Service return results on on countries which geocoding marked as YES in following spreadsheet:

http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mapcoverage_filtered.html

More info should be found soon from official documentation:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Geocoding_Direct

Answer 5

iPhone OS 3.0 now has the MKReverseGeocoder class for precisely this purpose.