GeoNames Forum

Hi,

the project looks great! However, I would like to see more data about each location.

I'm thinking about street address, telephone/fax numbers, email addresses, opening times etc. (e.g., Cafe Ursula, Ehrenströmintie 3, Helsinki, Finland, tel +358 1234 321, mon-sun 09-20)

Also, a short description would be nice (e.g., A popular cafe with a sea view.) and a gallery of images.

Have you thought about a more detailed categorization (feature classification), e.g., restaurant -> thai/italian/chinese etc. ???

Keep up the good work!

Regards,
Kari

Hi Kari

Do you know a large dataset to start with when adding additional columns to the database schema? I don' want to make the database schema more difficult then required. So I only add new fields when we have some large source to populate it with.

I guess types of restaurants are not the topic of GeoNames. My vision for the future is that we have some feature identifiers and can link to other sources for more information. This means we could link to an open restaurant project for more specific information about a restaurant, reviews and so on.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Marc,

sadly I don't know about such databases (which would be free/open). That was one of the reasons why I was asking about it, I hoped GeoNames could be extended to be such a database.

So, you are more keen to import external datasets than getting manually user entered data. I understand that it can give faster results (if you can get access to external free data). However, it isn't really the way the current collaborative web sites are working (e.g. wikipedia).. but I see your point.

Where did you get the hotel datasets? Did the data include street addresses of the hotels or only the longitude/latitude?

Thanks,
Kari

Hi Kari

The idea is that we collaborate in finding and integrating data sets. That is also the way wikipedia works, by the way, a lot of information is generated and updated by robots who inject entires data sets into wikipedia.

Instead of adding a record or two you can reach out to data providers and ask them for data. With a couple of emails you will get tens of thousands of records.

Cheers

Marc