Question

I am looking for an alternative to Google’s reverse geocoding service.

In short, I want a user to click on a map and pre-fill a form with an address for a particular latitude and longitude. Similary to this this example.

EDIT

I am using OpenStreetMaps and according to Google’s terms I am not allowed to user their geocoding services without displaying them on Google Maps.

Answer 1

There are plenty of geolocation APIs out there. If you need lat/long -> geolocation info (such as city, country …) correspondence you should look at the Yahoo PlaceFinder API which implements an API call returning informations based on a lat/lon pair (http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/).

However most of those APIs are free but limited by the number of API call.

What you can also do is using the IP address of a user to locate him, it will work in most cases since users using proxys or VPNs are few. Then you will be able to use a free service such as http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php or http://www.iplocationtools.com/api.html to make a correspondence between the IP address and the geolocation infos. There are even free databases you can easily find making this correspondence if you don’t want to rely on third-party APIs.

Hope this will help you.