GeoNames Forum

Hi,

Something I am wondering about is the goal of the Geonames Project. Does it aim at staying a 100% Free, not-for-profit organization, that gives away its database, source code, etc, or does it plan to become a commercial project at some point, keeping some data from the public and only opening a [restricted] WS access ?

In fact, my main worry is that the available database dumps contain all the cities, and GIS features, but do not contain the references to the external sources (for instance, for each feature, we only have the geonamesId, not the GNIS FeatureID). So we don't know which feature is a GNS one, which feature comes from another website, etc.
This means that if one day, geonames.org becomes commercial, it means all geonames users have no way to fork and continue to update the system...

So, it is really weird, because on the one side, I see that there is some source code (only client side though for now) available for free, and some data available for free, but on the other side, I wonder what the plans are..

Thanks,
Sami Dalouche

Hi Sami

The mission of geonames is to organize the geographical information of the globe and make it universally accessible and useful

The geonames project does aim at providing a 100% free download and also provide free web services. The long term future of the project, however, is determined by users and contributors. J. F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
There are a couple of scenarios how to pay for the servers, one of them are donations, consulting around geonames or commercial web services (sla with guaranteed response time, guaranteed uptime, dedicated server for a limited number of users, no limit on number of web service call per day,...). See also the email interview with Miguel Cuesta for dirson. In any case I don't think you have reason to worry about commercialization of the project.

As for the codes to data providers and sources, we are working on this. There are innumerable codes of different data suppliers for each feature. In France for example it would be interesting to have the INSEE code for every feature for which such a code exists. Would you like to contribute to this? You can also contribute to the source code, if you want to see it grow. If you don't want to contribute, you cannot expect it to grow.

Regards

Marc

Hi,

We are currently creating a start-up that will make use of the Geonames dataset to locate cities. Geonames will be the first open source project we give money to, as soon as we make some

(We use quite a lot of Open source stuff, and will give money back whenever we can : "We love open source because it is open source, not just because it's free"). Once we have money, I have nothing against buying support / updates / whatever concerning Open Source.

My worry was about the project's goal. I completly understand the fact that any community-driven project goes wherever the community wants it to go. I just wanted to make sure about the good intentions

Concerning my contribution to Geonames: The first thing I might be able to contribute is a list of Wines (crus) associated to their respective cities. (It is not currently associated to cities, only zipcodes, so there might be some work involved..) (so that people can easily GIS localize wines..). Concerning INSEE Names, well, I am currently (struggling to/working on) to get Lucene/Compass to work correctly and efficiently, in order to index all the city names. Once all this is working, fuzzy-matching INSEE Names against All possible names of each PPL feature should give pretty good results. I'll spend some time hacking on that once my search engine works

In any case, if I do some programming tasks that might be useful for Geonames, I'll for sure contribute it.

Regards,
Sami Dalouche

Oops, forgot to login to write the last post. Anyways, it was mine

Anonymous wrote:

Hi,

We are currently creating a start-up that will make use of the Geonames dataset to locate cities. Geonames will be the first open source project we give money to, as soon as we make some (We use quite a lot of Open source stuff, and will give money back whenever we can : "We love open source because it is open source, not just because it's free"). Once we have money, I have nothing against buying support / updates / whatever concerning Open Source.

My worry was about the project's goal. I completly understand the fact that any community-driven project goes wherever the community wants it to go. I just wanted to make sure about the good intentions

Concerning my contribution to Geonames: The first thing I might be able to contribute is a list of Wines (crus) associated to their respective cities. (It is not currently associated to cities, only zipcodes, so there might be some work involved..) (so that people can easily GIS localize wines..). Concerning INSEE Names, well, I am currently (struggling to/working on) to get Lucene/Compass to work correctly and efficiently, in order to index all the city names. Once all this is working, fuzzy-matching INSEE Names against All possible names of each PPL feature should give pretty good results. I'll spend some time hacking on that once my search engine works

In any case, if I do some programming tasks that might be useful for Geonames, I'll for sure contribute it.

Regards,
Sami Dalouche