Bonjour à tous,
it is our pleasure to announce the we now also return the EPCI - (Établissement public de coopération intercommunale) for geocoding results in France.
EPCIs are a unquely French concept - a communal unions between municipalities. They are not part of the traditional administrative hierarchy, but they provide a way for communities to share expertise and resources. Learn more about EPCIs over on French wikipedia.
A few weeks ago we were approached by one of our French customers asking if we could add this information to geocoding results. After a bit of research we were happy to agree. We now set the name of the EPCI in the key local_authority in the components portion of geocoding results in France.
As an example, here are the JSON components for the first result for a query for the city of Metz, France. You can see the key/value "local_authority" : "Eurom\u00e9tropole de Metz",
"components" : {
"ISO_3166-1_alpha-2" : "FR",
"ISO_3166-1_alpha-3" : "FRA",
"ISO_3166-2" : [
"FR-GES",
"FR-57"
],
"_category" : "place",
"_normalized_city" : "Metz",
"_type" : "city",
"city" : "Metz",
"continent" : "Europe",
"country" : "France",
"country_code" : "fr",
"county" : "Moselle",
"local_authority" : "Eurom\u00e9tropole de Metz",
"municipality" : "Metz",
"political_union" : "European Union",
"region" : "France m\u00e9tropolitaine",
"state" : "Grand Est",
"state_code" : "GES"
},
You can test it yourself on our geocoding demo page:
Many thanks to the customer for this suggestion and funding the development work.
Happy geocoding, whether in France or elsewhere!