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Geonames.org as Data Provider?
posted by Satri
on Thursday July 06, @07:34AM
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from the more-than-names dept.
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from the more-than-names dept.
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.
Related Stories
Semantic Web: Searching for Geospatial Ontologies
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The semantic web still being in infancy, this post from the Semantic Web Blog explains how to search for geospatial data on the semantic web using Swoogle. From the blog: "Swoogle is a Semantic Web search engine developed by researchers at the Ebiquity Research Group at UMBC. As of June 5th, 2006, the Swoogle crawler has found 1.5 million semantic web documents."
Feature Extraction From Satellite Imagery
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From the GeoNames Blog : "Spot Image, a leading provider of satellite imagery, are making a fantastic offer. Spot Image are teaming up with GeoNames to help improve the availability of free geographical data and offer high resolution 2.5m satellite imagery for automatic feature extraction.
Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task."
For a better overview and links of importance, please visit the GeoNames Blog.
Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task."
For a better overview and links of importance, please visit the GeoNames Blog.
GeoNames Founder Discusses the Project and More 1 comment
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Inkslinger writes "
Marc Wick discusses the GeoNames project: how it started, what it uses to keep running, where it is being used and where the project is heading. He also discusses the exciting use of geo-data in mobile applications: "In the mobile space I see the most interesting applications on devices with integrated GPS chip. Reverse geocoding the latitude / longitude provided by the GPS chip will enable applications to assign place names to the current location. I think of a camera that automatically assigns or tags photos with place names and maybe even the names of objects visible on them," he says. Other topics he talks about include how an increasingly GPS-enabled world is driving the need for free data and the politics of data access..." See also many previous GeoNames stories below.
GeoNames for Drupal 5
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serosero writes "The GeoNames webservices are now avaialable for the thousands of Drupal (Open Source Content Management System) users with the GeoNames API for Drupal. All XML-based services are supported by the API, and the information is conveniently available through a standardized function."
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"
Elevation Data from Webservices
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The High Earth Orbit blog discuss tools to know th altitude of any given location on Earth. From the blog: "EarthTools has a webservice that covers the US and Europe using the SRTM data. Given a latitude/longitude it returns the height above sea-level in feet and meters. [...] Geonames offers two services using the SRTM data, and also the GTOPO30 from the USGS. Geonames gets bonus points for also returning the results in JSON."
GeoNames Does Geocoding for Microsoft's Popfly
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The Geonames blog informs us the new Popfly mashup tool uses Geonames for geocoding. From the blog: " Popfly is kind of a foolproof, slick version of Yahoo! pipes based on the Silverlight browser plugin. For geocoding there is a predefined block GeoNames to access geonames.org web services."
70,000 Hotels added to Geonames
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The Geonames blog informs us 70,000 hotels has been added to the Geonames database. From the entry: "This new hotel data is provided by various hotel booking systems. So far geonames.org is working together with three hotel booking systems : hotels.com, diytravel and laterooms. Data from other providers will follow. [...] The challenge in this task was to integrate and match data from various data providers. Names and addresses of hotels as well as data quality may vary dramatically among providers and it is often difficult to figure out whether two hotels are actually the same hotel or not." Geonames was discussed previously on Slashgeo, see related stories below.
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.
Geonomy Webmapping Tagging Website
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Ogle Earth discuss the recently launched the Geonomy geotagging-on-webmaps website. From the blog: "Right from the get-go, Geonomy sports over 400,000 georeferenced locations — wikipedia articles, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency data, user-added content, geographic features — all of it searchable, viewable in Google Maps, and browsable by category and tag. [...] That makes Geonomy more like Wikimapia and Geonames.org than Tagzania."
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.
Data is the Next Intel Inside
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Following last week's story of Digital Globe's deal with Google, many voices pointed to the importance of data in the industry. From this short O'Reilly Radar entry: "As Microsoft's acquisition of Vexcel earlier this year also confirms, this is unlikely to be the only or last case of landgrabbing and does a good job in reminding us of Tim's argument that Data is the next Intel Inside -- a source of competitive advantage." There's a link to Jo Walsh's excellent post named "Why open geodata in an open source software foundation?" See also the numerous related stories below.
Worldwide Geographic Names Database 2 comments
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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!
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