5

I'm wondering if there is a (free?) web service that will return the type of terrain at a specific latitude and longitude?

The most important data I'm interested in is whether the point is over water or over land. It would also be useful if I could find out if the point is in an urban area, desert, or in the rainforest, etc. I might be able to guess that based on average rainfall/temperature for a location, or doing a reverse geocode.

Calvin
  • 4,177
  • 1
  • 16
  • 17
  • 1
    Similar question focused on the binary land-or-water question, but with lots of solutions of varying granularity: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9644452/verify-if-a-point-is-land-or-water-in-google-maps – Toph Oct 04 '13 at 02:55

2 Answers2

3

Check out GeoNames database, 7.5 million locations including lat/long/elevation and type of each location (see dictionary here).

Tomasz Nurkiewicz
  • 334,321
  • 69
  • 703
  • 674
  • GeoNames is pretty amazing. I can't imagine a free/cheap service much better than that. Thanks. – Calvin Apr 07 '11 at 21:30
0

I don’t know any ready-to-use web service, but I imagine you could use data from OpenStreetMap; if you are only interested in large bodies of water (e.g. be able to distinguish points in ocean), even the small png2tileinfo file would be enough (having 2-bit information for every ~0,088° square). Otherwise, the whole rest of the precise data is available there, but some preprocessing of the huge amount of data would be needed.

Mormegil
  • 7,955
  • 4
  • 42
  • 77