Documentation

Reverse geocoding

How the nearest places to a point are found.

Ordering by plain degree distance picks the wrong places away from the equator: at 69° N, one degree of longitude is only about 0.35 of a degree of latitude.

So /v1/reverse works in two steps:

  1. Take the size nearest rows by degree distance from the GiST index. The farthest of them bounds how far the truly nearest rows can be.
  2. Measure the geodesic distance of every row within that bound and return the nearest, each with distance in kilometres.

Only rows within boundary.circle.radius kilometres (default 1, at most 100) are returned.