GeoNames Forum

Hi,

Sometimes, there are duplicate entries for the same place, like 306194 and 306195 for Köycegiz. I know from local knowledge that the place of 306195 is correct and 306194 is wrong.

I have already moved 306194 a little bit to the south-east to the correct place, but is there a possibility to mark that it is a duplicate of 306195? I don't know whether the entry should be simply deleted, the ID might be in use as a foreign key from other applications outside of Geonames.

Regards,
Hakan

Hi Hakan

We delete duplicates and write the geoNameId of the duplicate and remaining toponym in the comment. You are right it could lead to problems for applications using the geoNameId as a foreign key. But we have to get rid of duplicates and with the information in the comment is is possible to find the correct toponym. We have never had any complaints by users about this problem, so it is to be assumed that it is not a serious one. As soon as we see that this is a real problem we will find a more formal way to communicate the correct geoNameId of a duplication.

Marc

Hi,

I'm not sure that I get a "comment" attribute and / or tag in the webservice answer.

I never dared

to use the "delete" button on the web interface, so I don't know whether I can write a reason for my deleting a toponym somewhere

I found that I can automatically identify deleted nodes with the status tag ("<status message="this geonameid does not exist" value="12"/> ") but having a "this geonameid moved to xyz" would be useful

Regards,
Hakan

You are right this could be a usefull feature, though I don't think it should have high priority. (You are the first to ask for it)

Marc

marc wrote:

You are right this could be a usefull feature, though I don't think it should have high priority. (You are the first to ask for it)

No, not high priority at all, just an useful feature if and when you get around to it (is there a public bugtracker where one might document such nice-to-have features?)

Am I the first one who wants to create a notification service for data that was fetched from geonames some time ago and has changed in the meantime?

Regards,
Hakan

I don't think the web service is a good notification service, since it requires active polling.
There are daily deletes and modification lists in the dump directory. And the full dump too helps spotting deleted records.

Marc