GeoNames Forum

So, I'd like to eliminate my project's reliance on the GeoNames web service. A couple reasons for this: 1) to avoid an outage of my service because of an outage of the GeoNames service, and 2) to avoid contributing to the load on the free web services bandwidth.

Anything special I should know in order to implement this? I'm an experienced .NET developer, I use MSSQL2008, ASP.NET 3.5. I see that there's several different packages that contain the GeoNames data: all countries, individual countries, cities, etc. Does AllCountries.zip contain the GeoNames data in its entirety? For example, does it contain the city data? Or is the city data separate?

I'm sure I can figure it all out, but any pointers would be great.

Thanks again to Marc and anyone else that had a hand in getting the web service hardware issues resolved! =D

- J

In addendum to my first post, the only function that I require of the GeoNames data is to lookup time zone offset info and the country code for any given lat/lon coordinate. I currently query the free GeoNames timezone XML service for this info.

Another question: I currently use a for-pay geo-coding service to lookup lat/lon coordinates for given city/state combos and postal codes for both the U.S. and Canada. Is this something that I could reliably do with the GeoNames data?

Once again, I know I can figure this out if I start digging through the data, but I'm just looking for a quick answer to save myself some time.

- J