GeoNames Forum

Hi,

(I cannot change the lat/longs directly from the web interface, so .... )

What is the main source for Canada's Lat/Longs ? It looks like thelat/long for "Saint Lambert", near Montreal is incorrect, and I wonder if other canadian cities have incorrect data too...

http://www.geonames.org/6138599/saint-lambert.html advertizes 48.95019 / -79.46636 whereas http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Lambert_%28Mont%C3%A9r%C3%A9gie%29 advertizes 45° 31’ 20’’ Nord 73° 30’ 37’’ Ouest .

http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=fr&geocode=&q=montr%C3%A9al&ie=UTF8&ll=45.497684,-73.511581&spn=0.310435,0.6427&z=11&om=1 seems to correlate with Wikipedia...

Regards,
Sami Dalouche

Hi Sami

The lat/lng data for Canada is from 'geobase.ca' an official source and the lat/lng are certainly correct.
We have several places with the name 'Saint Lambert'. What was wrong was the population for the first 'Saint Lambert' it is a small village and does not have 20.000 inhabitants. There was an mapping error when a GeoNames users sent us a list with population numbers from statcan and the wrong place has been updated.

On this faq page we have documented how we have mapped the feature codes used by geobase.ca to our feature codes :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/9.page

It cannot be excluded that there is an error in this mapping. In the original files we have the following feature codes ('terms') :

geoNameId 6138599 (the small village in the middle of nowhere) :
conciseTerm>Village
genericTerm>Municipalité de paroisse

geoNameId 6138603 :
conciseTerm>Unincorporated area
genericTerm>Secteur

geoNameId 6138601 :
conciseTerm>Geographical area
genericTerm>Paroisse

Marc