GeoNames Forum

Hi,

This is my first post and Im glad to see this wonderfull project. Hats off to you people.

I have few things to ask.

I need to setup countries having their cities. Each city will have lat and long, so as its time zone. I will be using my own db rather than your service as ur server is getting cluttered with requests out there.

Wat i will do is that query by db by cityname or placename. Find out its timezone and return currenttime for instance.

The way i have found is that i need allcountries.zip and 3 zip files for the cities, from the dump. Is that correct?

I m concerned wid keeping the data insync. with your database.
I have read the post here http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/155.page.
I want to ask if any progress has been made in this direction?

Also, Can you please tell me how often data is updated in this database? Do i have to sync. daily?

I forgot to ask one thing that how i will link country to cities? which field is being used to make relationship between the two?

Regards
Shahzad

Hi Shahzad

The data is updated continously :
http://www.geonames.org/recent-changes.html

You can grab a new dump periodically. We have implemented the message queue to synchronize our own servers.

The relationship between cities and countries is in the column 'country code'.

Marc

thanks marc.

how can i access that message queue?

how correct is the timezone info for any place in the database?

regards
Shahzad

Hi Shahzad

The message queue is not (yet) available to third parties. I am scared of having to provide support for it and the daily dump is as good or better for nearly all applications.

The timezone info should be correct for nearly all places. I cannot exclude that for some places where strange rules apply the timezone might be wrong for an hour or part of it.

Marc

marc, can u tell me which files i need on daily or weekly bases, in order to keep my data up to date?

all files listed below zw.zip, at dumps page?
with the exception of following
readme.txt 07-Mar-2008 02:09 5.8K
timeZones.txt 07-Mar-2008 02:57 9.9K
userTags.zip 07-Mar-2008 02:57 141K

Shahzad

most files are more or less static or redundant. The files allCountries.zip and alternateNames.zip are updated daily.

Marc