Hi everyone,

following on from last week’s announcement of better geocoding of IATA airport codes, this week I write to announce that we now also support geocoding of SMDG port terminal codes.

'A container port terminal, specifically: SCCT'

As those of you in the logistics industry will know, “SMDG” is the Ship Message Design Group, is a non-profit association, run by and on behalf of companies and organizations working in the maritime industry. They maintain a list of container port terminals, each of which has an alphanumeric code. We now support geocoding such codes.

Here’s an example from our geocoding demo page, showing the map view for a request with query NOATB (the container terminal near Bilbao, Spain):

'Screenshot of the map view OpenCage geocoding API demo page with a search for "NOATB"'

It is worth noting that SMDG codes are (bizarrely) not unique, some are duplicated around the world. In those cases we return all possible matches and you should filter by country_code or UN/LOCODE both of which we set in the component portion of the results.

Here is the JSON for NOABT

         "components" : {
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2" : "ES",
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-3" : "ESP",
            "ISO_3166-2" : [
               "ES-PV",
               "ES-BI"
            ],
            "UN/LOCODE" : "ESBIO",
            "_category" : "place",
            "_normalized_city" : "Bilbao",
            "_type" : "SMDG container port terminal code",
            "city" : "Bilbao",
            "code" : "NOATB",
            "continent" : "Europe",
            "country" : "Spain",
            "country_code" : "es",
            "political_union" : "European Union",
            "province" : "Biscay",
            "state" : " Basque Country",
            "terminal" : "CSP SPAIN BILBAO TERMINAL"
         },

Happy SMDG terminal code geocoding,

Ed

As a reminder, we also support queries for UN/LOCODE codes.