Getting what seems to be incorrect data from GeoNames

Question

I have a hiking website. I am trying to query for parks big and small around the world where people could potentially go walking or hiking.

I was trying to use the GeoNames data and was using query arguments from this table:

http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html

Here is an example query I made trying to get parks:

http://api.geonames.org/search?maxRows=10&username=demo&q=PRK

and it gives me some things which are I have no idea what. Here is also another thing where I try to query for arctic spaces:

http://api.geonames.org/search?maxRows=10&username=demo&q=LAND 

And that gave places in the Caribbean :)

So I must be doing something totally wrong. My goal was to look up all parks in the world, and also cities (with state/country info) so that I can make that connection on my site for my users.

Is my goal possible to achieve? What was I doing wrong in my queries?

Answer 1

You're looking (Searching) for P R and K as strings.

You need to do FeatureCODE searches on Parks:

http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo

More Geonames API search information:

http://www.geonames.org/export/geonames-search.html