GeoNames Forum

For Germany we have the following administrative divisions :

ADM1 : 16 (Bundesland)
ADM2 : 22 (Regierungsbezirk)
ADM3 : 439 (Landkreis or Stadtkreis)
ADM4 : ca 12000 (Gemeinde)

I have started french translation :

Bundesland => Etat
Regierungsbezirk => District
Landkreis => Arrondissement
Stadtkreis => Ville-arrondissement
Gemeinde => Municipalité

Any comments ?

Sorry if I have chosen a wrong topic for my question. I have exported GeoNames database for Germany. All administrative divisions are OK but there is no information about cities in ADM4. All PPL objects have blanks in their ADM2, ADM3, ADM4 fields so there is no way to determine in which ADM PPL object is located. I want to know if this information will be added in the future and what is the proirity of this task? Thank you in advance for answers.

We will add the information when we get it. You are free to help finding the data.

Marc

ADM1 Codes for Germany:

According to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2: DE
(remove the last space in the URL between the ":" and the DE)

This maps the German State Names to the correct ISO_3166-2 Codes and the old ADM1-Codes for Germany in admin1Codes.txt from your database.

Baden-Württemberg DE.BW DE.01
Bayern DE.BY DE.02
Berlin DE.BE DE.16
Brandenburg DE.BB DE.11
Bremen DE.HB DE.03
Hamburg DE.HH DE.04
Hessen DE.HE DE.05
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern DE.MV DE.12
Niedersachsen DE.NI DE.06
Nordrhein-Westfalen DE.NW DE.07
Rheinland-Pfalz DE.RP DE.08
Saarland DE.SL DE.09
Sachsen DE.SN DE.13
Sachsen-Anhalt DE.ST DE.14
Schleswig-Holstein DE.SH DE.10
Thüringen DE.TH DE.15

All you need to do is to replace the third column with the second.

Thanks Guys![/url][url]

I just spent a day or so researching this issue -- then came here and found this discussion. One of these days I'll get things in the right order.

By my calculations there are 8328 German records for which the admin level codes are incorrect. I also believe that the records to the ADM1 level are correct. At first I thought the problem was that "Landkreis" records are at the ADM3 level when they should be at ADM2 and the ADM4 under the Landkreis records should be at ADM3. But then I find that some German states use a "Regierungsbezirk" layer which really is the ADM2 that is above the "Landkreis" level. Note that not all states use this structure so for those states there is no ADM2 level. All in all the data appear to be correct. However this begs the question: Is the data modelled correctly?

Perhaps we should start a discussion about how to best model the data bases on usage. For the most part I think that, in most cases admin levels are used to start/restrict searches. So, for example, one might want to find all the lakes in Weld County, Colorado, USA and so start with that restriction. In a sense the admin records are used to traverse up and down a hierarchy.

Perhaps a structure that uses up and down pointers (a b-tree approach for the technically minded) might be in order here.