GeoNames Forum

Hi Eddy

As far as I know google does not have any free data.

Marc

Hi Paul

I am afraid there is no xml schema or dtd. I guess it would be nice, at the other hand you are the first to ask. Proper documentation for the styles is missing as well.

Marc

Hi

For some countries the NUTS codes and the ISO codes are representing the same areas, for other countries they are not. There is no general rule.

Best

Marc

The list of alternate names is not meant to be parsed and I don't want to kind of sign a contract that it will be done this or that way. It is a comma separated list that can be used for search - nothing more.
If you want anyform of contract then please use the alternate names dump.

Best

Marc

You are right, I have deleted 3172090.

Marc

Hallo Robert

Es gibt keine Version auf deutsch. Du kannst es aber relativ einfach aus dem alternatename table erzeugen.

Gruss

Marc

Hi Giorgio

As often in life the answer is 'it depends'.

GeoNames has better global coverare for cities and other populated places whereas google has coverage for street level geocoding in some countries, something GeoNames is missing completely.
Depending on your focus either GeoNames or Google is more complete.

Best

Marc

Hallo Kasimir

Versuche die single quotes rund um 'de' wegzunehmen. Dann sollte es funktionieren. Du suchst so nach der Sprache "'de'" (mit single quotes), diese Sprache gibt es nicht und es wird der default Englisch zurückgeliefert.

Gruss

Marc

Hi Sami

I have checked in your file to the csv and included it in the dump script. It will be included from tomorrows countryInfo.txt dump file.

Best

Marc

The alternatename column in the allcountries table is a convenience column, it is redundant to the alternate name table. Instead of parsing it you might consider to directly use the alternatename table information.

Marc

Hi Mike

You are right, this was broken. Thanks for telling us.

Best

Marc

Zero accuracy means we don't know. The field has been added rather late and most of the records that have been in the database before we have added the field have a null value.

Marc

Hi Giorgio

1. I have started to include OpenId with OpenId4Java, but there were some problems with the xml libraries they require. It basically broke our other webservices and I didn' t have neither the time nor the interest to fix this OpenId4Java lecacy issue. I will have a look again when I have found a clean implementation in java.

2. Admittedly the user interface is outdated and in need of redesign. The overview map for instance could now be done directly with googlemaps as they have this feature now included in the API. Do you want to propose a new design?

3. An REST webservice API to automatically insert/update features exists. I can send the documentation link to you if you are interested. I only want trustworthy people to use it, so their is no link to the doc on the site.

Best

Marc

Aaron

I think that France for instance belongs to Europe. I understand that some dependencies are outside of Europe and this should be reflected somehow. I think most users of GeoNames are mainly interested in the 'main' continent of a country, but we should also be able to include the information how countries may depend on each other. The best will be to keep this information in a separate data set, so that users interested in this information can read the dependency information and build their applications accordingly. The dependency information is not that big, it can easily be cached and be part of the application itself.

Best

Marc

Hi Hakan

There is an API to update and insert records. I can send the details to you if you are interested.
It is also possible to send a list with the changes to me and I run the update as a batch job.

Best

Marc

Tony

For countries it is exactly the same as for cities. join the geonames table with the alternatenames table to get the names in other languages.

Best

Marc

Hi Cimm

Mentioning it in the readme and the download page is perfect.

Best

Marc

Hi Martin

No problem with German. I am from the German speaking part of Switzerland.

The error message speaks about a WSDL document. I am not familiary with the Visual Studio product line, but it seems to look for a SOAP service. GeoNames is using REST services which have become popular in recent years and may not yet be included in a 2005 release.

I guess you will have to write the web service access your self. It should not be too dificult. Read the document at the url, parse the xml and enjoy.

Best

Marc

Hi Seokho

You have received it the same day you have asked for it, the first of July. And now again a second time.

Best

Marc

I think we should keep it for reference for our users. A lot of them will still have records with 'CS' somewhere and would like to know what it is.

Marc