GeoNames Forum

I downloaded the all the database dumps (Geonames, Features, Admin1, Admin2, Countries, Language Codes) from the GeoNames.org and imported into MySQL. So far things seem to be fine except some minor warnings while loading data into the MySQL.

Before using the data for my website (which targets a particular country, not the whole world), I was thinking of providing some editable interface to my users when they are going to provide their location information, especially for the missing Admin2 information directly in the Geonames table. But I would like to monitor the changes and should be able to revert the changes if someone provides wrong information either by mistake or by intention.

I was wondering to see how the Geonames database is setup in recording these changes as well as the deletes into the databases. I would appreciate it if anyone especially admins could provide an insight of the Geonames Database Structure.

Thanks in advance. Ofcourse if everything works well, I could send those changes back to the GeoNames.

Good call Satynos. I was also wondering, if it would be possible to have SQL dump files instead of plain text dumps. This way we could easily replicate the db structure.

Thanks giorgio79. I would appreciate if any of the admins respond to the request at the earliest of their convenience.

Though it would be good to have sql dumps, I don't think it benefits everyone, for example if the sql dumps are from MySQL, they may not be compatible with other SQL servers. I am not sure. But would certainly appreciate to see the schema so that any one can replicate in their own environment.

Thanks in advance.

In the FAQ there are a couple of threads to import GeoNames into all major databases :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/forums/show/6.page

We believe csv is the simplest form to provide the data. It can easily be loaded into all databases and it can be processed by all application environments. SQL dumps would only be loadable in one database type and would make it unnecessarily difficult for every body else.

Marc

marc wrote:

We believe csv is the simplest form to provide the data. It can easily be loaded into all databases and it can be processed by all application environments. SQL dumps would only be loadable in one database type and would make it unnecessarily difficult for every body else.

As I said in my previous post, I do agree that CVS would be the best option as it is cross platform compatible. But if you read my first post in this thread, all I was looking for is not the schema of the main tables but the changes tables and how you are storing, auditing, reverting the changes if needed. By knowing the schema of the changes table, I could replicate the environment and send any changes that are made at my website back to geonames.org. What is the schema of the modifications.txt?

Thanks in advance.

modifications.txt is a subset of the geonames table generate at the time of creating the dump. It is redundant and only included in the download directory for convenience. All it contains are the records from the geonames table with the given modifcationdate.

Marc