Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

GeoNames Founder Discusses the Project and More

posted by Satri on Wednesday November 21, @01:09PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the finding-much-more-than-names dept.
Interviews Data Sharing GPS Geocoding Location-Based Services
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.

«  Tenth International Conference for SDI | The Relevance of Large Printed Maps for GIS and CAD  »

Related Stories

Worldwide Geographic Names Database 2 comments [+]
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!
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.
GeoDRM and Creative Commons: Geospatial Data Can't be Copyrighted? 4 comments [+]
The import cartography blog reminded me of this post on the OSGeo mailing list about Creative Commons's take on GeoDRM. From the post: "The very quick story is that they don't believe copyright can be applied to any geospatial data. Thus creative commons licenses don't work, since they depend on copyright. So people providing data have two options - public domain or make a contract that completely restricts it. [...] They are launching a 'facts are free' campaign soon to get across to the world that one can't copyright scientific data." See also numerous related stories below. Related to Creative Commons, the Brain Off blog tells us UK's Ordnance Survey now releases administrative geography under CC.
GeoNames Webservice Client for Java r0.5 Released [+]
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"
GeoNames for Drupal 5 [+]
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."
Facebook Virtual Earth Mashup using PopFly and Geonames [+]
Not groundbreaking, but the Microsoft Virtual Earth blog links to a tutorial to use MS's PopFly and Geonames to generate a map mashup of Facebook friends. Here's the resulting mashup. From the site: "Microsoft Popfly is a web application that lets you build mashups without any coding. You get a dashboard with differnt blocks already lined up for you. You can choose the blocks and then connect them around. Each block will give options corresponding to the service say for facebook you can choose from the drop down menu all the fuctions like getfriends, getpics etc. Choose one of the functions and pass the data on to the next block to process. We created a small mashup between facebook, virtual earth and geonames." Related, AnyGeo informs us of the Facebook GIS group. This is closely related to this previous story on Geonames and Microsoft Popfly and the mapping add-on for Facebook and MySpace which was sold $3M.
Industry: GeoNames Dataset Updated [+]
The GeoNames Blog reports : "In the last days the newest GNS release (2008-01-28) has been integrated into GeoNames. The GNS dataset is maintained by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, a US department of defense support agency. During this load we have updated 73′000 and inserted 44′000 new toponyms. We have only updated records that have not been modified by GeoNames users or other sources."

To get a more detailed listing and links to the NGA site, please visit the GeoNames blog.
Application Domains: GeoNames Web Services Goes Commercial [+]
GeoNames announced they're now offering commercial web services. From the entry: "A commercial version of our popular web services is now available to everybody. The commercial web services offer faster response time and higher uptime than their free siblings and come with two types of service level agreements. We recommend that professional users and mission critical applications upgrade to this premium service." GeoNames frequently made the headlines here. See also selected stories below.
GeoNames Founder Discusses the Project and More | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 1 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.