GeoNames Forum

Hi Jaap-Andre

This would be a very nice contribution. I fear we would have to ask permission to use the data for GeoNames. We don't have any problems giving credit to CBS, what does cause problems is "Reproduction for own/internal use is permitted". Not only do we use the data for our own use, the main goal of the GeoNames project is to collect free data and make them available.
Do you think you could ask them?

Thanks a lot.

Marc

The RSS to GeoRSS service returns only one location element per feed entry. The location returned is the one the service thinks could be most relevant to the entry text.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Nasko

I once did this for countries :
http://www.geonames.org/country-borders.html

and for admin divisions you can use these with 400px, 250px or 80px:

http://www.geonames.org/img/country/400/US.png
http://www.geonames.org/img/country/250/US.png
http://www.geonames.org/img/country/80/US.png

Best

Marc

Hi Julian

We don't yet have a consistent way of adding new postal codes. We would like to integrate the postal codes with the main database. For some countries we have started to add them as alternate names with the pseudo language code 'post'. France is more or less complete.

You can add postal codes as alternate names to a place name, though they will not immediately appear in the postal code listing.
You can also send me a file and I insert the codes directly into the database.

Best

Marc

Hi Anne

1. You are right. I think 'California' makes more sense. I don't know what jacopo thought when he changed this and I have changed it back.

2. The name field is a kind of international name for a place, though not all contributors adhere to this rule. Some insist on their local name to be the 'main name'.

Cheers

Marc

Thanks David.
I have switched to the newest java 1.6.6 version where the newest Timezone information is included.

Marc

Hi Ralf

Der cities ist nach 'relevanz' des Ortes (FeatureCode, Einwohnerzahl) sortiert. Die anderen nach Distanz.

Marc

Hallo Ralf

Auf der GeoNames webseite wird etwas wie der 'cities' service verwendet (bounding box). Dann gibt es auch noch die reverse geocoding services findNearby oder findNearbyPlaceName.

Gruss

Marc

Thanks a lot, Mike. This is a cool contribution.

Best

Marc

I am afraid there is no free street level data available for Spain.

Marc

For the US it is available here :
http://www.geonames.org/maps/reverse-geocoder.html#findNearestAddress

There was a dns problem in one of our data centers.

Marc

Carpii

Yes, the google maps think is the wiki edit interface. You can send me a file and I will update the database with it. Do you think we are allowed to use your data with our cc-by license? For the UK this is a particularly important point.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Phil

The admin tags usually are meaningful, issued by the responsible authorities and used by many governmental applications and datasets. The geonameid is an id we have made up ourselves. It is easy to convert one format to the other and we thought storing the official tags is more useful.

Marc

Danny

I fear GeoNames isn't offering any service for fuzzy address parsing.

Marc

Carpii

The 2nd set are records that have been added by a user last week. The user mistakenly used the feature code 'ADM1' for the records. I have deleted the entry for Northern Ireland and added a Dutch translation to the existing record. For the other three records I have changed the feature code to RGN (Region) as they are not an administrative region in our model.

Marc

Hi Liam

1. The summary is automatically extracted from the wikipedia full article markup. It can only be as good as the data, and the wikipedia data is not consistently following any rules and there are a lot of errors in the way people use the markup.

2. We could expose the wikipedia Ids. The wikipedia articles don't have any GeoNamesIds and not all of them are associated with a geonames record. For those that are mapped to a geonames record we could implement some service getting the corresponding wikipedia article for a given geonamesId.

3. A bug with compound search terms for the title field. Thanks for finding it. I have fixed it.

4. It is probably easiest to implement to retrieve the full text search and sort the result according to the distance.

Marc

Nev

The "timezoneId" is sufficient if you use a programming environment such as java that includes the Olson timezone rules. Everything else is redundant information.
The "rawOffset" gives the offset from GMT and the "time" gives the current time. I am not happy with the fields "gmtOffset" and "dstOffset" they are quite misleading, but do basically what Steven has said.

Marc

Hi Joe

No plans, not many have asked for it. What kind of addresses would you like to add? (It is not in our plans to become a spam target

Cheers

Marc

Hi Willem

Please add it as separate entry for Dutch as the other entry is probably a kind of general term valid in many languages.

The 'no changes, save not required' error has been fixed. Thanks.

Cheers

Marc