Using Geo APIs to pick a random town from anywhere in the world

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to use Yahoo's excellent GeoPlanet API: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/guide/api-reference.html

I would like to pick a random town from anywhere in the world but can't see an easy way to do it. I have tried querying by country and asking for children of type 'town', but can't seem to do that directly.

Can anyone think of a way to pluck out a random town WOEID without having to query the country, then the admin regions, then the admin 2, then the admin 3 etc.

I have also experimented using YQL, but don't have enough of an understanding about the available APIs.

Answer 1

Have a look at http://world-gazetteer.com/. You can store all towns in your local database, then do random select, and then just geocode selected town using any geocode service you like.

Answer 2

Just for phun, why not generate random lat/long & display whatever is there?