GeoNames Forum

Update: The group is back.

I don't know why it has disappeared nor why it is back again, but I see that some spammers have uploaded porn spam to the pages and file upload section. I have removed the spam and disabled the pages/file-upload feature.

In the meantime I had removed most links to the group from the site. This experience has shown how dangerous the use of google-hosted services is. The data can disappear from one moment to the other and it is impossible to make backups. Support by google is inexistant and there is no possibility to get in touch and ask what has happend to ones data or even get it back.

Marc

You have probably not installed all the fonts for asian languages and your computer cannot display the characters.

Marc

Hi All

The google group for GeoNames has all of a sudden disappeared. I don't know when and if it will be restored. I don't even know whom to contact. I have reported the problem to the google group help group, but I don't have the impression that somebody from google is reading the messages over there.
As usual with google, support is absolutely lousy.

Marc

Hi Wanderer

We don't have a mapping to TGN as TGN is not freely available and I guess if something is available then the TGN folks should have it.

Best

Marc

Thanks a lot for the update, Stephan. I don't dare changing it right now as it could cause problems to other users if we change it right now, but we will keep it in mind and possible do some changes later.

Best

Marc

Hi McBack

We have organized the administrative divisions with feature codes:
ADM1 =län (needs to be fixed, there is a thread on the geonames-google groups mailing list. Google groups is having some troubles and cannot be accessed at the moment, so I cannot post a link here.)
ADM2=landskap (seems correct too)
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=fi+adm2&country=FI

Further down it is different to your divisions. We have 415 ADM3, so I assume the ADM3 is missing. I have found a list here: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/nuts/lau_en.html
Do you think the lau region are the same you are referring to?

If the lau regions are correct you can help us fix this. First try to match the regions and find the missing ones. For the lat/lng you could use the average from the child regions. The lau numbers should be the admin3/4 codes. If a lot of changes are to be made then you can send me a csv file and I run it as a batch job.

Marc

Hi McBack

The postal codes are not yet editable. At the moment it is a separate database and in the long run we don't want to maintain two databases. We want to merge them with the main database and make them editable together with the other toponyms. For some countries we begun to add the postla codes as alternatenames for the pseudo language 'post'.
So the best at the moment would be, as you already done, to add the information in Swedish and Finnish to the main GeoNames table.

Best

Marc

Thanks Paulo. The Brazilian postal codes are now included in the dump and web services.

Best

Marc

The file allcountries.txt is updated daily. please feel free to help us improve it: http://www.geonames.org/manual.html

Marc

No. Can you suggest anything.

Marc

Please read the readme:
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt

The 'name' field stands for the 'name' of the toponym. A toponym is not necesarily a city and even for cities the population may be empty (0=n/a).

Marc

Sure, you can buy credits for the commercial servers here:
http://www.geonames.org/commercial-webservices.html

Best

Too many users

You can help get additional hardware with a donation:
http://www.geonames.org/donations.html

Hiren, please stop spamming me and the forum and check out the list of web services: http://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html

Marc

Hi SEO

Thanks for the compliments. Be reassured we are completely indenpendent from google.

GeoNames is financed with Donations and with some commercial services:
http://www.geonames.org/donations.html
http://www.geonames.org/commercial-webservices.html

Best

Marc

You are right there is something wrong. We have fixed it in the timezone webservice but not yet in the db: http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/755.page#4557

Marc

There are no rules. I was just under the impression that this is what people in the US feel about counties. If we set some as adm2 and others as adm3 it will become pretty messy.

Marc

Hallo Stefan

Du hast recht, das hat mit den hundertausen Vorlagen zu tun. Wenn du den xml export ansiehst sieht du, dass keine 'coor' Sachen zum Parsen drin sind:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Exportieren/Rapperswil_SG

Bezüglich der Harmonisierung sind alle Initiativen eingeschlafen, von denen Ich wusste. Es ist praktisch unmöglich, da professionel vorgehen zu können. Und wenn ich, wie ich dem Link von Kolossos entnehmen kann, jetzt auch noch verklagt werden soll, habe ich ehrlich gesagt wenig Lust mich noch weiter mit Wikipedia zu beschäftigen.

Hallo Kolossos

Danke für den Link. Schade, dass Jimbo Wales nicht schon von Anfang an eine freie Lizenz gewählt hat und uns diese unsäglichen Diskussionen erspart hat. Eigentlich sollte man die Wikipedia verklagen, wenn sie als die 'freie Enzyklopädie' auftritt und dies auch im Logo hat und dann droht Leute zu verklagen die Koordinaten und den ersten Satz des Artikels verwenden.

Gruss

Marc

It is pretty cool. Thanks for the link.

Marc

This is true. The list of divisions was a feature that was added later to the service and it was easy to add an additional xml element, but the json response did not allow for an additional document. As nobody was asking it we did not add the feature to the json response.

Marc