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70,000 Hotels added to Geonames

posted by Satri on Monday May 14, @10:59AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the one-database-to-bind-them-and-in-the-darkness... dept.
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.
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Geonames.org as Data Provider? [+]
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 [+]
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 [+]
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.
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