GeoNames Forum

Hi,

this is my first post, so first of all: Thanks so much for the GeoNames service and all the work that's been put into it! I've been using it a lot already and plan to continue using it.

I'm currently trying to create a database of all cities included in the allCountries.txt file, adding English, French and German names to the already included international name. Here's a basic example for the city, region and country names:

English:
City name: Rome
Region name: Lazio
Country name: Italy
...

French:
City name: Rome
Region name: Latium
Country name: Italie
...

German:
City name: Rom
Region name: Latium
Country name: Italien
...

I tried to implement this myself in Objective-C, but it was way more complex (programming- and runtime-wise) than I'd thought. For example, searching for the French and German translations of "Munich" would require to pick the correct line from the allCountries.txt file, extract the geonameID, search for it in the alternateNames.txt file, and extract the correct values from there. In order to translate the entire information, the same procedure would have to be done for "Bavaria" and "Germany". This is a pretty intense!

Do you know if there's an easier way to get all the localized information for the locations?
The best thing would obviously be a separate database like allCountries.txt for each language (French, German, Spanish and so on). Is there anything such being planned?

Thanks!

-Ry

Hi Ry

It is not yet planned to provide separate dumps for all languages. It would blow up the dump section considerably and those that need the translations can get them from the alternatename table. If you load the data in a database then it will not be very difficult to read the language you want.

Best

Marc

In that case, would it be possible to add the geoname ID to the admin1Codes table? I don't see a trivial way to get alternate names for the administration levels without the geoname ID.

it is as trivial as selecting from the geoname table all rows with featurecode=adm1.
The geonameid is already included in the admin1CodesASCII file, use this one.

Marc