GBIF Geocoder

Provides a reverse geocoding service, which is the process of back-coding of a point location (latitude, longitude) to a known location. This service relies on either a PostGIS database or shapefiles to recognize a coordinate in the boundaries of a several layers, including political divisions and subdivisions, continents and seas, etc.

The service exposed in this project is not intended to be used publicly, this service is used internally in GBIF services to interpret countries boundaries from geographic coordinates.

This project contains 3 modules:

• geocode-api: contains the GeocodeService.get(lat,lon) service and the Location instance returned by it.
• geocode-ws: RESTful API implementation of the GeocodeService.get(lat,lon) service. This service is accessible at the URL http://{server}:{httpPort}/geocode/reverse, and a debug interface is present at http://{server}:{httpPort}/geocode/debug/map.html.
• geocode-ws-client: Java client to access the RESTful service.

There is a supporting module:

• database: shell scripts to construct the PostGIS database and shapefiles, optionally run using Docker

How to build this project

Execute the Maven command:

mvn clean package verify install -P{geocode}