GeoNames Forum

Hi Arlene

The missing type information has to do with problems parsing wikipedia dump. Unfortunately there is no consensus in the wikipedia community on how to add geo information like coordinates and feature types to articles. At the contrary more and more wikipedians have fun inventing new templates. I would not be suprised if sooner or later we see a complete mess in wikipedia that makes it impossible to do anything useful with it

The only solution I see is that the wikipedia administrators restrict the generation of new templates.

Regards

Marc

Thanks, I will update the description.

Marc

Hi Arlene

I have added a new parameter 'title' which allows to search on the title only :
http://ws.geonames.org/wikipediaSearch?&maxRows=1&title=philippines

I don't know how much this new parameter can solve your problem.

Regards

Marc

Hi Andrew

The main name and the alternate names table are not yet redundant. You will have to implement a search on both fields or a combination of both fields.

We don't use mysql. The search is a full text search using the apache fulltext search library lucene : http://lucene.apache.org/

Regards

Marc

A file with ppl to pplx relation is available here :
http://download.geonames.org/ppl_pplx.csv.gz

As Sami said it has been automatically generated searching for the closest PPL for every PPLX. For Paris is returns 38 PPLX instead of the 20 expected PPLX (arrondissement)

Cheers

Marc

Hi Nico

I guess your problem has to do with the variable 'place' being null if no result could be found. Why don't you put another if after the assignment of 'place' checking whether it is not null?

Regards

Marc

Hi BlueMM

Thanks for your help. In general I would start top down and see that we can import the important data and less important data can wait till later. It is great if you can figure out the correct feature codes for buildings, at the other hand I think we could live with the generic feature code 'Building' for the time being.

1. The duplications will be added as alternate names by the import script.
2 and 3. There are only a handfull of records with these states, I think we can simply ignore them and forget them.
4. I don' t find records without lat/lng in my dump. I might have another version or I have already deleted them and forgot about them. I suggest to not load them. The UI is not optimized for moving places withouth lat/lng.
5. Do what you can do.
6. It is great if you can fix this. If not I will use the postgres 'initcap' command.
7. I have asked for permission some weeks back and the Registrar of Geographic Names has granted it to GeoNames.

Cheers

Marc

Spanish will certainly be supported with the next wikipedia load (I am in Spain at the moment). With Turkish I am not so sure. I don't speak Turkish and cannot read it.
Furthermore there not yet too many geo-coded articles in the Turkish wikipedia. (http://www.geonames.org/wikipedia/) When we have more articles we will certainly parse it and full text search it.

Regards

Marc

Hi Alexey

I am glad you could solve the problem. If you think other GeoNames users could run into the same problem then it would be great if you could post the solution.

Cheers

Marc

I am not aware of a wikipedia full text search API. You may have to build your own.

GeoNames bye the way is only searching over geo-coded articles.

Cheers

Marc

It would be easy to asssign ids to all records, but it would be difficult to maintain the id. If we pulish record ids user would rely on this id being constant and this is not trivial to guarantee. In short we don't have the resources to pulish and maintain constant ids, just to throw them away later.

Cheers

Marc

I have changed the feature code from 'populated place' to 'moor(s)'.

http://www.geonames.org/2802818/baarle-heide.html

Do you think this is a good solution? We can so still keep the name in case some one finds the name and wants to know what and where it is. Even if it is not widely used it still seems a feature we should not delete.

Cheers

Marc

Hi

Adding ADM2 to the dropdown list requires a bootstrapping task. GeoNames is using official codes for administrative entities and there is no entry field for this. If you only want to add a handful of them you can do so over the googlemaps interface in the same way you add other toponyms. You just have to tell me the official codes for these admin divisions and I enter it directly in the database to make it available in the drop down list.

It would be great if you could help mapping the VIC feature codes to the GeoNames feature codes. I will then map the VIC gazetteer toponyms to the GeoNames toponyms and insert the remaining records. It has been on my todo list for some months, but other tasks have always managed to get higher priority so far.

Regards

Marc

Hi Marc

I have fixed a couple of encoding problems for Canadian place names in the postal code data set. I hope I have found all of them.
The fix is available in todays dump.

Cheers

Marc

There is a workaround for this problem. The duplication check is only implemented for inserts and not for updates. You can thus use any name for the insert and rename it immediately afterwards to the correct name.

Marc

There are no restrictions on how GeoNames may be used for. You can use it for whatever you like.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Marc

It is not your fault. There seems to be something wrong with French characters for Canada / Quebec.
I will take care of it and keep you updated. Thanks

Regards

Marc

Hi

The GeoNames web site is not using the findNearby service. It is using an undocumented service to return the first x rows in a boundig box in no particular order.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Alexey

It is not necessarily a problem with the import. It could be a problem with your display encoding.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Troy

The '00' codes basically means that we don't know the administrative division.

Administrative divisions are rather complex and it is often difficult to get the required information. This is a fact I still don't understand the reasons for. Why do administrations make it difficult for people to find out how they are organized? It would seem logical that they make the information freely available, but they don't.
Another issue is that they is a constant merging, splitting and reorganising of administrative divisions. Often we know that something has changed, but we don't really know which city now belongs to which administrative division. This leads to the inconsistancies you have found. The file admin1Codes.txt contains obsolete administrative divisions, you should find the name of missing administrative divisions there.

Cheers

Marc