elasticsearch 7.8.0 or newer

[flashpixx]

Hello,

I try to import the geonames from the tar.gz into Elasticsearch 7.8.0 but this seems to fail. My question is, is it possible to support new elasticsearch versions or a more generic data format for importing?

Thanks

[ahalterman]

It's certainly possible! The code for building the ES index with geonames lives here: https://github.com/openeventdata/es-geonames. I've pinned the Elasticsearch version to 5.5.2 because the API changes slightly after that, but I would welcome a PR to bring it up to a recent version of ES!

[flashpixx]

For me two question are interesting:

1. why did you use ES, because the index structure depends on a web application with a REST API http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html so I can query the REST API direct without hosting elastic search. IMHO it could be nice to put a datasource for solving the geo name references and two implementions ES or REST API
2. A more flexible data structure would be nice, because If I would like to search for historic names, based on this another storage system like Postgresql / PostGIS or MongoDB can be used

[ahalterman]

1. I use ES because I wanted fuzzy matching, which is especially important for transliterated placenames, and because an early deployment of Mordecai used several workers that shared a single ES node. I don't want functionality to call Geonames directly because I don't want to put bandwidth costs on them.
2. I think historical queries would be really cool and I think you could build something like that in Postgres, Mongo, or ES.

[flashpixx]

historic data would be quite nice