GeoNames Forum

I'm wondering if someone has already attempted to make a mapping between geoname entities and yahoo WOEID-entities.

This may be incredible useful for a lot of applications.

Is this something that may eventually be included in geonames?

Thanks,
Britske

Sure, this would be very useful. Are you interested in helping with it?

Marc

Hi Marc,

sorry for the delay, somehow i wasn't notified of your reply.

Currently I have to do some disambiguation of very awful addresses (sometimes even without having lat/long pairs) I use the new Yahoo Placemaker to come up with a Town with a woeid, lat / long which I then feed to geonames.nearbyplaces to get the geoname place.

This means that for yahoo entities I fetch like this, I can make a pretty decent relation between woeid-entities and geonames entities. (using JaroWinkler + category matching + distance similarity)

I would love to help (in the small amount of time I have right now) but the problem is that you can't generalize this flow to mapping ALL entities. This is because Yahoo Placemaker is of no use here, i.e: feeding it with lat/ long is not possible.
Another way would be to go the Yahoo GeoPlanet route to fetch all woeid-entities. (starting with countries, admin-areas, cities) but that would take a pretty long time, since a rate-limit applies of 50.000 req's / day. (Placemaker has no limit!)

After having a woeid with lat / long (independent of how you get it) , matching to geonames works as described above. I guess I could submit this code if it's finalized.

Hope this helps,
Best,
Britske

thanks Britske, we are looking forward to whatever you can do.

Marc

Has anybody done this?

Hello

I am interested in this project mapping. My first issue is that it appears that yahoo does not allow one to download it anymore. If someone can point me to a copy or I provide an FTP I am willing to look at approaches for a match unless it exists already..

Thanks

Stuart

Hi Stuart

The guys from foursquare just released a mapping from geonames to geoplanet:

https://github.com/blackmad/geoplanet-concordance/tree/master/current

Best Regards

Marc