GeoNames Forum

How precised will The allcountries file be able to be in the future ?

I've added two PPLX - sections of populated place - for the village i live in.
I'm not sure, but it seems not possible to indicate those two new places are owned by my village, because it would need an adm5 field.

First, i thought of an id_parent field, but the problem with it would be not to be able to go back easily to the "grand_parent" place...

So, what about an ARBORESCENCE Field ? :

In addition to the very useful ADM1,2,3,4 fields, it could gather in one data (separated by comma) all the geonameids of the geotree of a placename.

It would then be very easy to make simple sql queries like :

select * from allcountries where ARBORESCENCE like '%," & geonameid & ",%' ;

The datas in an arbo field would be infinite cos would make the allcountries file able to indicate in one data:
continent,country,adm1,adm2,adm3,adm4,pplxid,streetid,blockid,spotid,etc...

Of course, it would heavy the database, so perhaps an new one could be done by side, with 2 fields : geonameid and arborescence

I'm new on geonames.org (great job marc !) so perhaps it's an already thought idea

Hope to help,

Seb H
France

Hi Seb

We have started with a n:n hierarchy relation and populated it with reverse geocoded data. A draft version is here: http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/415.page#2055

The hierarchy is not yet editable with the userinterface, though.

Marc