GeoNames Forum

how about mapping between gnis and geonames

Hi,
According to "About" page on geonames, you can get geonames id for a given usgs id. Rather than using calling the above service, is there a way to download geonames and usgs id mapping data.

==== excerpts from the about page
U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System (names in US).
Use the url http://www.geonames.org/maps/gnis-fid= to view a gnis record with its id. Example the link http://www.geonames.org/maps/gnis-fid=1702495 will display the gnis record with fid=1702495 on a map.
======

hi,

I have been testing geonames webservice and it seems the website is broken. For instance this links returns 404 not found error
http://ws.geonames.org/neighbourhood?lat=40.78343&lng=-73.96625

The above links is provided in Neighbourhood webservice description page. I tried other webservices and they are also failing. And If I go to http://ws.geonames.org/ the page is redirected to some other website. Just concerned whether the website has been hacked or what ?

hi,

I am trying to compare USGS domestic name dataset and Geonames dataset for US (+ dependent states). One thing that I am trying to do is to find records that are present in USGS, but not in geonames and vice-versa. However, I am not sure if there is any field that is common to both.

Can I assume name in both geonames and usgs are same. Or can I use any other column. I thought of using lat/lon but the problem with that they are not unique and there can be multiple features having same lat/lon.

Please let me know if anyone has any idea on how to compare two datasets.

Regards

It doesn't make sense!!!. I just downloaded both USGS and GeoNames dataset and after loading all the files in a MySQL database I did a row count. From the row count, it seems USGS has more features than in Geonames datasets (for US only). Here are the numbers that I got

USGS has 2,046,491 rows
Geonames has 1,886,390 rows

Can someone verify these numbers and if they are right, can someone tell why geonames has smaller number of rows

So I can assume whatever is in USGS will also be available in geonames. Are there any more benefits in using geonames over usgs domestic names database.

Regards,

hi,

Can someone tell me the difference between usgs domestic name dataset and geonames datasets. I am working on a project that requires only US related information and is not concerned about any other part of the world. Hence, I am interested to know which dataset is much more extensive and bigger.

Regards,