Places Details API Reference

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Places Details is designed for fetching detailed information about places using their unique identifiers (gid). It allows you to retrieve more information about a location you already requested.

This API is useful when you want to display more information about some places, for example its categories or its geometry.

When should I use Place Details?

  • You want to display the administrative area as a polygon on a map
  • You need more information of specific location

Parameters

In our API, all the configuration is done through query parameters.

https://api.jawg.io/places/v1/place?ids=whosonfirst:locality:102031307&access-token=your-jawg-access-token
\___/   \_________/\_____/\__/\____/\________________________________/              \____________________/
  |          |        |     \     \                  |                                         |
scheme     domain service version path             query                             authentication token
Parameter Type Default
access-token string
categories string
geometries string point
ids (required) gid
lang string en

💡 Explore our interactive examples. The left input shows the result using the current configuration, while the right input displays the result with default settings.

access-token

The access token you receive after having an account on our services.

Not registered yet? Create your account now https://www.jawg.io/lab/.

geometries

You can get the polygon geometries of places from administrative layers. The polygon returned will be a simplified version that you are not allowed to store. In order to improve our quality of service, we strive to improve our data and this also includes the update of polygons.

When geometries parameter is used, the parameter ids can have only one element. If we do not find a polygon for the selected place, the default point will be returned.

When a polygon is actually returned, the centroid is stored as a top level Feature property, next to the bbox. The accuracy is also changed to source instead of centroid.

In this example, the island of Corfu is returned with its geometry.

  • geometries: source

➡️ Returns locations with their geometries when available.

ids

This is where you put the gids of the places you want us to return. When the gid is not found, it will be removed from the return list. To search for more than one place in a request, join multiple values together and separate them with a comma.

Due to the ever-changing nature of most of our datasets, some gids can change merely by importing newer data.

  • ids: whosonfirst:locality:102031307,whosonfirst:locality:102031567,wof:locality:102031439,wof:locality:102031735

➡️ Returns locations in the order requested.

lang

The lang parameter is used to specify the targeted language for your results using the IETF BCP 47 language tag. By default, the API will use the user's browser language (thanks to Accept-Language HTTP header) and defaults to English.

When the translation is not available in your language, it will return the name in the local dialect or English.

➡️ Returns locations in German.