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Mapzen Search: Beta to V1 transition guide

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.

This project is moving out of the beta stage and has 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.

API keys

The first big change is the introduction of API keys. Like all other Mapzen APIs, Search now requires an API key. You can register at the Mapzen Developer Portal and generate one (or more) for all your search needs.

Mapzen Search API keys allow you:

  • 6 requests per second
  • 30,000 requests per day

To start using an API key, append &api_key=mapzen-xxxxxx to all API calls to all endpoints (aside from /attribution, which requires no key).

Your API usage limits are displayed in the HTTP headers of any API call, such as in this example:

X-ApiaxleProxy-Qpd-Left:4828
X-ApiaxleProxy-Qps-Left:4

Changes to domain and URL structure

Mapzen Search is now hosted on the search.mapzen.com domain. The former domain, pelias.mapzen.com has been deprecated. To take advantage of the full v1 API, you must use the search.mapzen.com endpoint.

Additionally, all endpoints are now under the /v1 namespace. For example, the full URI to the /reverse endpoint is now https://search.mapzen.com/v1/reverse.

Requests going to pelias.mapzen.com will continue to work until the end of November, 2015, at which point the servers handling pre-v1 requests will be disabled.

Changes to response document

The response document is still plain, vanilla GeoJSON. Dots will still show up without a problem! Take a look at the specification document or the sample response for further details.

Metadata

The GeoJSON result object now contains a geocoding property that has lots of information about the request, such as how Mapzen Search parsed your query, certain explicit errors and warnings, and an attribution link.

Features

The bulk of a valid response is still an array of Feature objects, ordered by result ranking (most relevant result first).

If the only property you used before was text for what to display, you'll have to change it to label and you'll be ready to process responses.

Used to be (Beta) Is now (V1) Notes
text label The suggested display text. You can construct your own from the elements passed along, but this is Mapzen Search's 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
admin1 region States and provinces
alpha3 country_a Three-character abbreviation for country
admin1_abbr region_a Region abbreviation (such as NY = New York, usually two characters)
locality locality No change
neighborhood neighbourhood Note change in spelling
category Deprecated This functionality is in progress and should be available soon.
address:{} Address elements are no longer grouped into their own object
address:{zip} postalcode
address:{number} housenumber
address:{street} street

Most parameters (and options) for search have been renamed:

Used to be (Beta) New parameter (V1) New behavior (if any)
input text
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. See the table below for a 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. Mapzen is reevaluating which elements of the response document make most sense for minimization. If you've got opinions, let us know at search@mapzen.com

layers used to be 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 help improve clarity.

Beta V1 Represents
layers=geoname sources=geonames or sources=gn All manners of places from Geonames
layers=osmnode layers=venue,address&sources=openstreetmap Venues (points of interest) and all places with addresses from OpenStreetMap
layers=osmway layers=venue,address&sources=openstreetmap Streets and highways with addresses
layers=admin0 layers=country Countries
layers=admin1 layers=region Provinces and 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, neighbourhoods, or microhoods)
layers=locality layers=locality
layers=local_admin layers=localadmin Local administrative areas (such as 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)
layers=address layers=address

So the new, valid layers values are:

  • venue
  • address
  • neighbourhood
  • localadmin
  • locality
  • county
  • region
  • country
  • coarse

And the sources values are:

  • openstreetmap or osm
  • geonames or gn
  • openaddresses or oa
  • quattroshapes or qs

Additions

New What's it do?
sources parameter Pick the data source (separate from layers)
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 (looking for countries, regions, counties, localities, neighbourhoods), were available on /search/coarse. This is now handled as a layer on search.

A former query for a coarse geocode may have been: https://pelias.mapzen.com/search/coarse?input=<search-text>

That same query would now be written as: https://search.mapzen.com/v1/search?text=<search-text>&layers=coarse&api_key=<mapzen-xxxxxx>

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 show 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)
input text Required
lat / lon focus.point.lat / focus.point.lon Biases search results toward places nearby, without excluding global matches. No longer required for /autocomplete
size Deprecated Responds with 10 results every time
zoom Deprecated
layers Deprecated
bbox Deprecated
details Deprecated

Deprecated endpoints

  • /suggest/coarse
  • /suggest/nearby

/reverse

Reverse geocoding finds the places closest to geospatial coordinates.

https://search.mapzen.com/v1/reverse?point.lon={longitude}&point.lat={latitude}&api_key=mapzen-xxxxxx
Used to be (Beta) New parameter (V1) New behavior (if any)
lat / lon point.lon / point.lat Required
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 (formerly /doc)

/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:

https://search.mapzen.com/v1/place?ids=geonames:3544:adm1:fr:fra:paris&api_key=mapzen-xxxxxx

Security

In-browser cross-site scripting

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 (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. You are encouraged to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, especially when handling sensitive personal information (such as users' searches or users' location data).

What's happening to pelias.mapzen.com?

The beta API available at pelias.mapzen.com will be available 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.

Where to send comments and issues

Let us know.

Words go to: search@mapzen.com

Issues go to GitHub