GeoNames Forum

Hi !

I am a junior researcher from a Belgian university and I would be interested in using geonames data for statistical analyses.

As I am particularly interested in the population figures for each cities, I would need some extra information regarding the quality of the data. I already performed some computations using the full dataset, which I restricted to only the populated places with a known population.

1) How up to date are theses figures? If the "Modification date" field is set to "1/06/2012", does it mean that the population figure is valid for this date, or that one element only of the record has been modified at this moment?

2) Are some populations figures deduced from projection instead of observations?

3) In terms of accuracy for the population figures, how geonames distinguishes itself from other websites such as World Gazetteer or citypopulation.de?

4) How are the sources selected? Are Census sources given priority to others?

5) If I take the US data for example, I noticed that among the ten most populated towns are New York City (#1), Brooklyn (#4), Manhattan (#7) and Bronx (#9). There is an obvious overlapping which I suspect comes from the definition of the city versus agglomeration. Is there anyway I can harmonize the definition of a city in order to select, for instance, only the administrative cities?

Thanks in advance for your answers and congratulations for this amazing website!

Regards,

Dam!en

Hi Damen

The modification field gives the last time the feature was modified. It does not refer exclusively to the population field, nor does it refer to the date the population number was valid.

GeoNames is a gazetteer, population is one of many attributes and it is only meant to give an aproximate value. If you need exact population numbers with precise dates then you will have to look for other sources.

Best Regards

Marc