GeoNames Forum

Would be possible extent geonames service to support polygonal lines and polygonal area objects for cities, mountain ranges, park, lakes, paths etc...
So far you represent this objects only by one point (country borders are exeption) but this approach is not sufficient as this object like large cities, mountain ranges are not points in fact.

I suggest you the following solutions:
1) Simplest solution - allow approximation of area objects one circle or ellipse
2) Another solution - allow approximation of area objects by more then one circle or an ellipse. Combining of ellipses one could express quite complex shapes...
3) The best solution - alow closed polygonal borders for area objects...

I prefer 3). The problem is where to get the data from. We will start dumping polygon data as soon as we have found enough data sources.

Marc

marc wrote:

The problem is where to get the data from.

I guess that those vector data is not possible to get for free... Are you going to implement polygonal editor to geonames web editing inteface? It would be nice if you enabled to enter polygonal data manually...

Manually entering polygons is not easy, in particular if it should be useful. Polygons for Alaska for instance often have over 70000 points.
We are discussing with a large satellite image provider how to extract vector data from the imagery and combine it with GeoNames data, and we are also discussing with a large photo geotagging site how to extract clusters from geolocated tags.

Marc

I know this is an old area, but what about TigerData? I think its from the US Census. Other countries probably have a similar feature or service.

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/