GeoNames Forum

Hi all,
There are quite a few countries that don't have the capitals of the 1st level administrative provinces marked as such (they are marked as PPL instead of PPLA).
For example, for Canada there are only two cities correctly coded as province level capitals (Quebec City and Halifax):
http://ws.geonames.org/search?country=CA&featureCode=PPLA
Before I spend countless hours doing this I thought I should ask the following:
- Does this data already exist, but the db has not been updated yet, or I'm doing something wrong? (this is probably just wishful thinking on my part).
- Does anyone know of or have a source for this data so I may automate the process a bit and save tons of time and my sanity.
- Is anyone working on this already or is anyone interested in taking this on with me? We could split the work... the more the easier it would be.
Hope you are all doing great,
-Martin

Attachment: I am attaching an html page that has a list of countries and links to the pages in wikipedia.org and statoids.com that list each country's administrative divisions. These pages, for the most part, have the capitals listed with each administrative division.

Here is the list of the countries which are missing this information:
United Arab Emirates
Algeria
Albania
Andorra
Bangladesh
Belize
Bhutan
Brunei
Canada
Cambodia
Sri Lanka
Chile
Comoros
Costa Rica
Cuba
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Ethiopia
French Guiana
Georgia
Guatemala
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
Iceland
Iran
Israel
Iraq
Jamaica
Korea, North
Kuwait
Latvia
Libya
Moldova
Oman
Mexico
Nepal
Suriname
Nicaragua
New Zeland
Paraguay
Pakistan
Papua New Guinea
Qatar
San Marino
Somalia
Syria
Turkey
Taiwan
United Kingdom
Ukraine
Uruguay
Venezuela
Namibia
Yemen
Zimbabwe

Hi Martin

Thanks a lot for your offer to help. The data for seats of first (or
lower order) administrative divisions does not yet exist, and I don't
know of a good and free source. A lot of countries already have PPLA,
some of them like the UK and France have PPLA2 (seats of ADM2) flagged
with tags.
Example :
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=ppla&country=GB
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=ppla2&country=GB
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=ppla2&country=FR
The reason for the tagging is that is allows for multiple
classifications. Cities often serve as seats of more than one
administrative level (PPLA or PPLC) and the feature classification only
allows for one code (the top level code).

Please go ahead with Canada and other countries in order of your
priorities. It is very much appreciated.

Best Regards

Marc

google groups thread for same issue :
http://groups.google.com/group/geonames/browse_thread/thread/3df96305e1d54e22?hl=en