GeoNames Forum

Why do some countries in the countryInfo.txt fiel have a geonameid (last field in a row) set to zero?

The 'important' countries should all have geonameIds. There are some 'countries' where the status is no obvious. Is American Samoa a country or does it belong to the US?
You can help find the missing geonameIds, just post them in the thread I will add them to the file.

Cheers

Marc

Yes thanks. That helps me a lot. I'll simply leave the countries with zero out of my app.

BTW Yor data collection is great!!!

I work for the Archaeology Tech Lab at North Dakota State University. We are hoping to port our DANA-WH web app ( http://www.dana-wh.net Digital Archive Network for Anthropology and World Heritage ) over to Google's App Engine technology. Additionally we would like to integrate Google Maps into the data entry and data return mechanisms.

Geonames seems to be a robust collection of geographical data, and we are hoping that we could capitalize on this so we don't have to reinvent the wheel for our own application.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the Geonames data seems to be oriented around Political organization and not geographical.

Digging through the geotree.geonames.org site, I noticed that several countries (us territories) aren't displayed. For instance American Samoa isn't displayed. I assume that this has something to do with the fact that it doesn't have its own geonameid. Hence the reason I am posting here.

Our specialization is Oceania, but Oceania seems to be broken up a bit differently than we would expect. For instance, Hawaii is considered part of Oceania (at least where archaeology research is concerned), but it shows up under North America > US in the Geotree. However, American Samoa and Guam don't show up in the the geotree at all.

Is there a means to get around this? It would be helpful for our app if certain types of information could be returned geographically. Where Hawaii and Pacific US territories could be listed as:
Oceania > United States > Hawaii
Oceania > United States > American Samoa
Oceania > United States > Guam

Of course, I realize that this creates a conflict with other US territories outside of Oceania region such as Puerto Rico that is listed as its own nation under North America.... and probably difficult to deal with in the same manner as the Pacific territories because of political reasons.

Anyway, 1/4 of my time over the next year will be devoted to porting our application over, so I would be willing to help address these issues.

Thanks,

Aaron

If it can help, here's my view :

According to wikipedia, A "country is a political division of a geographical entity".

So, I think american samoa definitely is a country according to this definition. We're not talking about state/nation here.

So, it would definitely make sense to attach it to oceania instead of north america, no matter what the links between american samoa and the US are.

Aaron

All countries in the country.txt file have been assigned a geonameid.

The question what to do with dependent countries has not yet been thoroughly discussed. I think it is a rather complex question and would deserve a thread of its own. It would make sense to list all dependencies and decided which dependency gets which feature code. At the moment I fear it is not fully consistent.

Cheers

Marc

Sorry, sometimes I'll be slow at responding to posts. I only work here one day a week.

Well, I'm happy to start this discussion. We have a bunch of archaeological data for American Samoa, so we'd like to help hammer this issue out.

Aaron