GeoNames Forum

Die Raiffeisen Bank der Schweiz hat vor kurzem eine kartenbasierte Suche nach Filialen und Bankomaten (ATM) auf ihrer Homepage lanciert :
http://www.raiffeisen.ch/raiffeisen/internet/home.nsf/fFramesetKarte?readform&L=D&type=bank

Ein Ziel von Geonames ist es in nächster Zeit die 'Point of Interests' zu verbesseren. Dazu gehören sicherlich auch Bankfilialen. Ich habe deshalb bei der Raiffeisenbank nachgefragt, ob die Daten dem geonames.org Projekt zur Verfügung gestellt werden können. Kurz darauf habe ich je eine Datei mit den Filialen und eine mit den Geldautomaten erhalten. Die 1148 Filialen sind bereits in geonames.org integriert :
http://www.geonames.org/recent-changes/user/raiffeisen/

Die Geldautomaten sind noch nicht in geonames.org integriert. Was denkt Ihr wäre es interessant auch diese Daten im Projekt integriert zu haben?

Do you know where we can get the new province boundary file?

I have fixed the sorting problem with the country drop down list.

It is not a problem on your side if the automatic information enrichment in GB does not always work. In the UK we don't have much data available and if a new place falls in a previously uncovered area we don't know enough about it to do it automatically. There more information we have the better it will become.

The same with the drop down list for admin2. Not all second order administrative divisions for the UK are properly set up.

I have added the adminCode2 to all Italian provinces.

Normally we determine provinces with the use of boundary shape files. For the new provinces we don't have any shape files and we will have to find an other solution. If you know of some simple rules like 'everything north of this latitude is part of this new province' we can do a batch update directly on the database.

I believe nobody is really happy with the word 'is Official Name' and we should rename this to 'is preferred Name'. A place can have more than one preferred name. In fact it could have a preferred name for each language. The capital of France 'Paris' could have a preferred name in Japanese if there are several alternate names in Japanese available and we want to indicate which one is usually preferred by Japanese speakers.

On the country level we have a list of languages spoken in the country like "fr-FR,de-FR,br,co,oc" for France. The languages are ordered by the number of people that speak this language in the country. We only consider official languages in this field. For Switzerland we have "de-CH,fr-CH,it-CH,rm", though more people in Switzerland speak Portuguese, Spanish or Turkish as their mother language than Romansh.
The information is available in dump directory in the 'countryInfo.txt' file : http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt

What is missing is information about the languages spoken in a province. We can add a new file to the download 'admin1Info.txt' with these attributes :

countryCode, adminCode1, geonameid, name, ascii name, languages (ordered by number speakers), ISO 3166-2 code, Fips code

With this information an application should be able to display the 'local' name in most cases. It will not be sufficient for all cases. I fear it will become too complex if we try to solve all possible cases.
The files "admin1Codes.txt" and "admin1CodesASCII.txt" will become obsolete as all information is then combined in the file 'admin1Info.txt'.

Hi Sami

I think an additional column will not be easy to understand and the file will need a comment section in any case to describe these issues. What if the comment is sufficient and we don't need an additional column at all? Is there a real value in a new column compared to a comments section?

Cheers

Marc

Hi Parikesit

It is great that you want to contribute to the geonames project. You can send the file to my email address marc@geonames.org

Thanks

Marc

Hi Dan

Geonames is using a lot of sources to support place names in over 200 languages.
Among the sources are iso, nga, wikipedia, geonames contributors, the UN or unicode.
Unicode is an important source for country names :

http://unicode.org/
http://unicode.org/cldr/repository/common/main/en.xml?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/xml

Cheers

Marc

Der Stern bedeutet, dass der Ortsname rechts von der PLZ geschrieben wird.

Hi Rigo

Das ist gut versteckt im cvs, Spalte 'postalcode' 9 ist Zahl, A ist Buchstabe :

http://geonames.cvs.sourceforge.net/geonames/data/

Marc

Hi Timo

There was something weird with the database access. I am now using an other geospatial function and your station is found.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Simon

You can now add the paramter style=FULL to get the alternate names :
http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?name_equals=MAN&fcode=AIRP&formatted=tr&lang=iata&style=full

Cheers

Marc

Hi Simon

If you don't need the airport name you can add the lang parameter to ask for the pseudo language IATA. The service will then return the name in the requested language and you can filter the one you need.

http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?name_equals=MAN&fcode=AIRP&formatted=tr&lang=iata

The service based on the id would not be too much work. (an hour or two)

Cheers

Marc

Hi Simon

Dane County Regional airport was already in our database but the iata code was missing :
http://www.geonames.org/5250078/dane-county-regional-airport-truax-field.html

Please feel free to add missing codes or airports. For the code just add them as alternate names with the language codes 'iata' or 'icao'.

Cheers

Marc

You are right, I have only read the first paragraph of the wikipedia entry :

Attualmente le province italiane sono territorialmente 110, cui corrispondono 109 Amministrazioni Provinciali, suddivise in 20 regioni.

further down they write :

nel 2004 il Parlamento ha istituito le 3 province di Monza e della Brianza, di Fermo e di Barletta-Andria-Trani che diverranno operative nel 2009 portando il numero complessivo delle province a 110 (inclusa la Valle d'Aosta).

It means now there are 107 Italian provinces and in 2009 they will be 110 provinces in Italy.

You can add the parameter maxRows to the search url to display more rows :
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=adm2&country=IT&maxRows=200

Hi Andy

I have just released version 0.4 of the geonames java API. It includes the radius parameter for the reverse postal code geocoding.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Simon

1. You can use the 'name_equals' parameter instead of the 'name' parameter to get the IATA name :
http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?name_equals=ORD&fcode=AIRP&callback=blah&formatted=tr

If this is not enough for your needs we will have to use a new service to access directly a toponym with a third party Id.

2. Which airport in Tokyo has the IATA code TYO? "Tokyo International Airport" has the IATA code HND and "Narita International Airport" has the code NRT.

Cheers

Marc

It is true, our data base is missing some 'new' provinces for Italy. Geonames.org has 94 provinces for Italy, but there are now 110 provinces. 16 provinces are missing in the geonames data base. There was a restructure in Italy in 1995 and our database is missing these 'new' entries.

It would be fantastic if you could help us fix this problem. You can add the 16 missing provinces with the wiki interface. Only the assignment of the admincode2 is a bootstrapping effort and has to be done directly on the database. I will take care of this.

Next step will be admin level 3 for Italy. For adm3 we have as good as nothing (144 our of 8100 communes).

Marc

Only weather stations within ca 100km radius are searched.

Marc

Hi Sami

I guess you are right, please feel free to add a new column (how many columns will we have in the end?)
My first impression was that the Guernsey Pound is the same thing as the British Pound. Unfortunately this seems not to be the case and the Guernsey Pound is not accepted in the UK. It is really weird that a small country like Guernsey needs own bank notes, but it is not up to us to judge this.

Cheers

Marc