GeoNames Forum

I hope this is not featured in some F.A.Q. - I tried but did not find anything about this. I hope this question is not too dumb, but here it goes.

Currently geonames data says U.S.A. capital is "Washington". Even google when queried says it's "Washington". However, Wikipedia, CIA Factbook and other sources have it as "Washington, D.C.".

Now, I'm aware that there's also the state of Washington and disambiguation is one issue. But, I've also learned that "Washington, D.C." is also known as "District of Columbia" and is not just a city (like most capitals) but in fact an area (please do correct me if I got this one wrong) so I wonder if there's more into this than I'm aware?

I'm not claiming you (or anyone else) have it wrong - but I would like to understand what's the (most) correct way, and why some places have it as "Washington" and others as "Washington, D.C.". Is it only for the sake of disambiguation? From searches, it does not seem to be even be any discussion on this, so I'm pretty sure it's a set in stone thing, but yet not clear to me.

(My inner geek wishes that "Washington, D.C." make parsers have the hiccups with the commas version, thus some sources having it just "Washington".)

Finally, a disclaimer: I'm not American - I live across the pond so this might be obvious to some, but it is not to me. If some could give me a clear answer on this, it would be great. Thanks in advance!

The official name is "Washington, D.C." but people often refer to it as just "Washington". Nothing to do with parsers, only brains and tongues of human beings.

Marc

Thank you for the quick reply - I wasn't putting my hopes in the parser theory

.

Still, if it is clear that "Washington D.C." is the official name and "Washington" is somewhat of an alternative name, shouldn't geonames (and google for that matter) return 'Washington D.C." since it's the most correct and official one? That would also help with the disambiguation too.

I should had added that the reason that prompted my initial message was that I'm using geonames data through the countryInfo webservice (great service by the way!) to fill data into a large website I run. The website has quite a large bunch of users and from time to time I get an occasional user nagging me with "it's wrong, the U.S.A. capital is not Washington, is Washington D.C.". That's what prompted me to research about this topic.

At this point I'll probably apply a local exception on the update task specifically for the U.S.A., although it does feel a bit strange that I've to do this to get the official name correctly displayed - I would imagine others to have the same issue.

Anyhow, thanks again for the reply!

Lucky, your users if they have no other problems

GeoNames is normally using the short and most commonly used names. If you want the longer official names you can read it from the alternate name table. Screen real estate is expensive, users prefer 'Washington' instead of 'State of Washington'.
The official name of my own country is 'Confœderatio Helvetica', but nobody is using this name. It is usually called Switzerland.

Marc