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Worldwide Geographic Names Database
posted by dct
on Friday March 10, @07:23AM
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from the What's-in-a-Name? dept.
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from the What's-in-a-Name? dept.
Cartography writes: "A number of countries offer up their official geographic names on the web for use and/or download (e.g. Canada). Geonames has compiled a worldwide database that is searchable and downloadable. Typing in a placename will bring up a Google Map mashup with the location pinpointed - along with all other nearby geographic names." It gives credit to La Cartoteca for the find!
Related Stories
Geonames.org as Data Provider?
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The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog describes why GeoNames.org is his favorite geo-data provider. The short entry worth the read and underlines many great features of GeoNames: "It features about 2.2 million records of geographical information. [...] Many reasons why Geonames.org is interesting: First, it provides a unified representation of geographical data from different providers. [...] Second, it provides web service API for querying geographical information. [...] Third, Geonames web service supports both JSON and XML output."
We introduced GeoNames a few months ago.
Application Domains: 500,000+ Mapped Wikipedia Entries via Geonames.org
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This unrelated Geobloggers entry lead me to the Geonames.org mapped Wikipedia entries page. See previous stories, including this Geonames.org as data provider story. From the website: "The Geonames database currently contains around 500'000 geolocated Wikipedia entries in 210 languages.
A full text search over the georeferenced Wikipedia articles is available in English, German, French, Spanish and Polish.
The data is also available as webservice : Wikipedia Webservice " A Slashgeo reader also shared this Google Maps extension for Wikimedia. Oh, and don't forget the great Geonames kml for Google Earth.
Geonames Machine Tags
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A discussion on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog lead to the idea of using Geonames.org as a provider of machine readable geotags. One possible application is to use such geotags from Geonames for geocoding photos, which is discussed in Flickr's case by the geobloggers blog. From the former blog: "Now we know how geonames’s URL pattern works. We can map the above URL to flickr’s machine tag syntax.
[namespace]:[predicate]=[value]
To identify Golden Gate Brdige in geonames using the machine tag syntax, we use the the following string:
geonames:feature=5352844" The idea is covered on the official Geonames blog.
GeoNames Webservice Client for Java r0.5 Released
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GeoNames has been covered regularly on Slashgeo (see related stories below), but not the GeoNames Webservice Client which just released Java r0.5. The post: "
Version 0.5 of the GeoNames Webservice Client for Java has been released today. The release includes support for all four administrative levels, a bug fix for the address reverse geocoder, addition of timezone to Toponyms, enumeration for the feature class, and some minor changes.
Java is by far not the only programming language you find GeoNames client libraries for. Some libraries we know about are :
* Java : GeoNames Webservice Client
* Ruby : GeoNams Ruby API
* Perl : Geo-GeoNames
* Python : geopy
* Python : geoname.py by Zindep
* Lisp : cl-geonames
* PHP : SOLMETRA Maps"
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Worldwide Geographic Names Database
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The link...
(Score:3, Informative)( http://www.redgeographics.com/ )
Looks like it's using GNIS for my country, which is a couple of years old and, due to several rounds of municipal restructuring, not up-to-date anymore. However, it's a very nice mashup.
Hans van der Maarel
Re:The link...
(Score:3, Informative)( http://www.geonames.org/ )