documentation/transition.md

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.

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.

API Keys

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.

Mapzen Search API keys allow you:

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

To start using an API key, append &api_key=search-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.

e.g.

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

Changes to response document

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

Metadata

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).

Features

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.

Used to be (Beta)	Is Now (V1)	Notes
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™️
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)
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. 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

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.

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 & Highways with Addresses
layers=admin0	layers=country	Countries
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, neighbourhoods, or microhoods)
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)
layers=address	layers=address

So the new legitimate 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

Oooh, shiny!	What's it do?
sources parameter	pick the datasource (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

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: 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=<your-api-key>

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)
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.

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={your-api-key}

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. We encourage you to use HTTPS in lieu of HTTP, especially when handling sensitive personal information (e.g. users' searches, users' location data).

What's happening to pelias.mapzen.com?

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.

Anything Else We're Forgetting?

Let us know.

Words go to: search@mapzen.com

Issues go to Github