Feed JSON to Nominatim with import.io

Question

Greetings fellow SO users,

I am extracting data with import.io from a site which contains city names. What I want to accomplish is to get the coordinates to each city from Nominatim and finally create/get a JSON response which contains the city name and the corresponding coordinates for each. So I basically need to use the result from one API as the input for another (Nominatim). Or in other words: feed a JSON list of city names to OSM's Nominatim and get back the coordinates to each city.

I wonder if this is even possible or what other options I have. Finally this would be used with leaflet to put some markers at a map. There are tutorials for Nominatim, how to query etc. but only one query at a time. Is it even possible to query a whole list of places?

Answer 1

What you want to achieve in here is what we call Chained APIs. So you will need two APIs, where the input of the second one is the output of the first one.

In this case you will need some custom processing between the two APIs. From the first API you are getting the city name and from here you need to generate a list of URLs in the format http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=CITY&format=xml one per each CITY.

After that you can use the Bulk Extract feature in import.io and pass the whole list of URLs to be queried against the API.