Is there a web service that provides the type of terrain in lat / lon?

Question

I am wondering if there is a (free?) Web service that will return a terrain type with a certain latitude and longitude?

The most important data that interests me is a point above water or above land. It would also be useful if I could find out if the point is in an urban area, a desert or in a rainforest, etc. I could suggest that based on the average rainfall / temperature for a location or performing reverse geocode.

Answer 1

Go to GeoNames , 7.5 million places, including lat / long / elevation and the type of each location (see dictionary here ).

Answer 2

I don’t know any ready-to-use web services, but I think you could use data from OpenStreetMap ; if you are only interested in large bodies of water (for example, you can distinguish points in the ocean), even a small png2tileinfo file will be enough (having 2-bit information for each square ~ 0.088 °). Otherwise, the rest of the exact data is available there, but some preliminary processing of a huge amount of data will be required.