First of all, thank you for being an early user of Mapzen Search/Pelias. You trusted the idea of a modern geocoding service built by and for the open mapping community and have helped make that happen.
We're moving out of our beta stage and have an updated API designed to support the next several generations of progress to Pelias and Mapzen Search.
The changes aren't too drastic and should be implementable in an afternoon or a day at most for existing users.
These changes also affect self-hosted users of Pelias upgrading from the beta to 1.0 (leaving aside API key restrictions), but these users can make the upgrade on their own time.
The first big change is the introduction of API Keys. Like all other Mapzen APIs, Search now requires a free API key. You can register at the Mapzen Developer Portal and generate one (or more) for all your search needs.
The response document is still plain vanilla GeoJSON. Dots will still show up without a problem! Take a look at our [specification document](https://github.com/pelias/geocodejson-spec/blob/master/draft/README.md) or our [sample response](https://github.com/pelias/geocodejson-spec/blob/master/sample.geo.json?short_path=7cdb999) for further details.
The GeoJSON result object now contains a `geocoding` property, that has lots of goodies about the request (how Mapzen Search parsed your query, certain explicit errors and warnings, attribution link).
The bulk of a valid response is still an array of `Feature` objects, ordered by result ranking (most relevant result first). Changed feature response elements include:
If the only property you used before was `text` for what to display, you'll just have to change it to `label` and you'll be ready to process responses.
| `text` | `label` | Our suggested display text. You can construct your own from the elements passed along, but this is our best understanding of how to display it. |
| `layer` | `layer`&`source` | Some layers were not attributes, but sources the data was derived from. This has been split out into a separate field. (see Search/Layers below for full explanation) |
| `admin0` | `country` | Now with Human Readable:tm: |
| `admin1` | `region` | States & Provinces |
| `alpha3` | `country_a` | 3-character abbreviation for country |
| `admin1_abbr` | `region_a` | Region abbreviation (e.g. NY = New York, usually 2 character) |
| `locality` | `locality` | No change|
| `neighborhood` | `neighbourhood` | Note change in spelling |
| `category` | Deprecated | We're rethinking categories. They'll be back soon, better than ever.|
| `address:{}` | | address elements are no longer grouped into their own object |
| `address:{zip}` | `postalcode` | |
| `address:{number}` | `housenumber` | |
| `address:{street}` | `street` | |
# Changes to `/search`
Most parameters (and options) for search have been renamed:
| Used to be (Beta) | New Parameter (V1) | New Behavior (if any) |
| `lat` / `lon` | `focus.point.lat` / `focus.point.lon` | Biases search results toward places nearby, without excluding global matches |
| `zoom` | `focus.viewport.min_lon`, `focus.viewport.min_lat`, `focus.viewport.max_lon`, `focus.viewport.max_lat` | Passing along information about how far out an end-user is looking is now accomplished by passing along the end-user's viewport. Why judge just from a centerpoint and a zoom level when you can see what the user's seeing? |
| `size` | `count` | Number of responses. Minimum: 1, maximum: 50 |
| `layers` | `layers` (SEE BELOW) | While the parameter remains the same, the options have changed. Please see the below table for description.|
| `bbox` | `boundary.rect.min_lon`, `boundary.rect.min_lat`, `boundary.rect.max_lon`, `boundary.rect.max_lat`| Bounding box parameters are now individually specified to prevent error.|
| `details` | Deprecated (for the moment) | `details=false` used to respond with a minimized set of elements. We are reevaluating which elements of the response document make most sense for minimization. If you've got opinions, let us know at [search@mapzen.com](mailto:search@mapzen.com)|
`layers` were previously opaque about many of the kinds of places they represented (particularly the administrative layers). `layers` were also used to retrieve places from a particular source. `sources` is now a separate parameter from `layers` to facilitate clarity.
| `layers=admin1` | `layers=region` | Provinces & States (for the most part) |
| `layers=admin2` | `layers=county` | Things within states that often aren't cities, but sometimes are.|
| `layers=neighborhood` | `layers=neighbourhood` | Neighbourhoods (within localities, may be [macrohoods](http://whosonfirst.mapzen.com/spelunker/placetypes/macrohood/), neighbourhoods, or [microhoods](http://whosonfirst.mapzen.com/spelunker/placetypes/microhood/)) |
| `layers=locality` | `layers=locality` | |
| `layers=local_admin` | `layers=localadmin` | Local administrative areas (e.g. New York City, encompassing the five boroughs of NYC, which are themselves independent counties)|
| `layers=osmaddresses` | `layers=addresses&source=openstreetmap` | Addresses from OpenStreetMap|
| `layers=openaddresses` | `source=openaddresses` | Addresses from OpenAddresses |
| `layers=poi` | `layers=venue` | Places with walls |
| `layers=admin` | `layers=coarse` | Shortcut for coarse geocoding layers (see below) |
| `boundary.circle` | Bounding circle. Like a bounding box, but circular. Takes, `boundary.circle.lon`, `boundary.circle.lat`, and `boundary.circle.radius` (in kilometers) |
| `boundary.country` | Search only within a particular country. Takes Alpha-2 or Alpha-3 country code abbreviations.|
## Coarse Search
Coarse search (looking for countries, regions, counties, localities, neighbourhoods), was previously available on `/search/coarse`. This is now handled as a layer on search.
A former query for a coarse geocode may have been:
You can also call the coarse layers directly, namely: `country`, `region`, `county`, `locality`, `neighbourhood`, to restrict the kinds of results you'll get back.
Feel free to mix and match these layers with `boundary` parameters, particularly `boundary.country` if you want to restrict your results to a particular country.
# `/autocomplete` (formerly `/suggest`)
The `/autocomplete` endpoint serves as a renamed `/suggest` to indicate that these are not recommendations. It is subject to many of the same changes as `/search`:
| Used to be (Beta) | New Parameter (V1) | New Behavior (if any) |
| `layers` | `layers` | same set of layers as for `/search` |
New parameters:
-`boundary.circle` - use `boundary.circle.radius` to set the distance for a reverse point search in kilometers
-`boundary.country` - Restricts reverse geocodes to a particular country based on alpha2 or alpha3 country codes
## Reverse Coarse Geocoding
Reverse coarse geocoding is not a point-in-polygon lookup (finding the hierarchy for the polygon that the point falls in), but instead looks for the hierarchy of points nearby. To use reverse coarse geocoding, use:
`/place` is used to retrieve the underlying place record behind a particular result.
If a search returns `id: "geonames:3544:adm1:fr:fra:paris"` as the matching ID for a record, the complete underlying place record can be returned with:
If you were using Pelias from within a browser with client-side Javascript (using Pelias on a domain that is different mapzen.com), you should know that Mapzen Search does not support JSONP requests to get around cross-site scripting limitations.
Instead, Mapzen Search supports [Cross-Origin Resource Sharing](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS) (CORS), which enables secure cross-site data transfers.
Mapzen Search is set to allow CORS requests from all domains.
# HTTPS
Mapzen Search continues to support HTTPS and traditional HTTP. We encourage you to use HTTPS in lieu of HTTP, especially when handling sensitive personal information (e.g. users' searches, users' location data).
We're keeping the beta API available at pelias.mapzen.com up through the end of November, 2015. Starting December 1, 2015, you will only be able to use search.mapzen.com or your own hosted version of Pelias.
