inferring geographic entities from lat/long

[akthom]

Can we a) infer geographic entities (country and continent at least) from lat/longs and b) add a facet pane or similar that would make it possible to narrow down search by geographic entity?

Why we need this: right now, text searching by country/etc is tricky. For instance, there are many samples from antarctica that don't show up when you text search antarctica, because antarctica doesn't appear in the text of the record. Antarctica is a particularly good example of this because of a quirk of SESAR's metadata schema: SESAR only has a field for country, not continent. As I learned at the UNOLS workshop this week, there is a curator at the Polar Rock Repository that refuses to enter Antarctica into SESAR's "country" field. So, there are thousands of records that now missing this metadata and consequently not showing up in iSamples text search results. I'm sure there are lots of other cases where this happens.

[dannymandel]

I imagine there is some API we can find that does this. I’m not aware of any offhand but it seems like the kind of thing that should already exist.