GeoNames Forum

I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Do you think it is ok to use this forum for the discussion? I can setup a new category and for every toponym in dispute we open a new topic and a link on the google maps page will link to the topic?

So instead of a user comment we have a link to the topic in the forum?

What do you think?

Marc

Hi Jobrafo

This is something experimental. If geonames does not find a result and the countrycode is US, then the yahoo geocoder is used for the search as a fallback mechanism.

The result you see here if from the yahoo geocoder, and you cannot find it in geonames.
I will add a note in red explaining this for yahoo results.

The full fallback mechanism is :
1. search geonames
2. if nothing found, search the postal codes
3. if still nothing is found and countrycode =US, search with yahoo
4. if still no result, search wikipedia

Marc

Hi Mathieu

The search service has currently an average response time of 145 ms for
the last 50'000 requests. I will improve the logging to better log long
running requests, and I will come back to you as soon as I know more.

What I see is you are always calling the service with maxRows=1000. This
definitely slows down the service. If you don't need so many rows, set
maxRows to the largest number of rows you really need.

Marc

This is currently not possible, as our RSS to GeoRSS converter does not yet support Dutch.
The feed has as zip element within the item element. Unfortunately this is not part of the RSS2.0 specification :
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#hrelementsOfLtitemgt

We (the geonames team) are proposing to add this kind of information to the GeoRSS namespace :
http://georss.geonames.org/georss-draft.html

If you are the developer of the feed http://allestekoop.com/rss.php, then you can add the zip and country information using GeoRSS and we push the adoption of our proposal.

Marc

Hi Jobrafo

At the moment user comments are only possible for "delete". Inserts, updates and alternatenames have automatically generated comments.

The automatic comments help spot and correct vandalism. It would, however, be possible to add a user comment to the automatically generated comment.

Would you like to have user comments for inserts and updates or for alternate names or both?

Marc

It is changed :

http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=catalunya

Marc

The hierarchy web service now returns the continent in the first position of the result. Example :

http://ws.geonames.org/hierarchy?geonameId=1

Marc

Hi xavi

Yes this is true. They should be in the alternate names column.
The data for Canda is from http://geobase.ca/ and the toponyms in this dataset have different ids even if they refer to the same geographical entity. There are too many toponyms with exactly the same lat/lng and the same feature code (>30'000) to find duplicates manually. If you have an idea how to find the duplicates (alternate names), let me know.

Marc

A lot of toponyms don't belong to one single country but to several countries : regions, lakes, rivers, mountains,...

Do you think it would be worth the time to add edit functions for country information? Something like the edit interface for alternate names.

Marc

Hi

I am not sure whether I understand you correctly.

You can download the geonames database from here http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/

In the file alternateNames.zip you find the names of the toponyms in all languages.

If you only want the country names in some languages you can use the xml format :

http://ws.geonames.org/countryInfo?lang=de

or you can use the csv output .
http://ws.geonames.org/countryInfoCSV?lang=de

Just add the language you desire after the lang parameter.

I hope this answers your question.

Marc

Hi Jobrafo

In this case geonames tries to be too clever and automatically finds the country for the toponyms. I have to delete the country code manually. Just tell me when you add a new region and I will delete the country code.

Marc

The description of the two codes is as follows :

region : an area distinguished by one or more observable physical or cultural characteristics
area : a tract of land without homogeneous character or boundaries

We can also look at the existing codes :
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=fcode%3Argn
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=fcode%3Aarea

So I think it is more a "region". And you are using the word "region" in the subject line of this thread

.

Marc

Hello Szymon

This is perfect, it will be included in the next wikipedia load.

Marc

Hi borkhuis

IE seems to have a problem with the combination of onClick and href.
<a href="javascript:;" onclick="search_loc();">Zoeken</a>

Your example is working for me if either I replace the empty statement with the search_loc function :

<a href="javascript:search_loc();" >Zoeken</a>

Or if I add a 'return false;' in the onClick call :
<a href="javascript:;" onclick="search_loc(); return false;">Zoeken</a>

Hope this helps

Marc

I have doubled the input field to 120 characters and updated the "The Most Noble and Most Loyal City of Santiago of the Knights of Goathemala".

Thanks for letting us know about the problem.

Marc

First of all we will need an official iso country code. I wonder how long it takes for iso to agree on a code :

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/10faq/frequently-asked-questions.html#QS01

For the update of the country code for the toponyms in Montenegro we will need a border shape file to do it automatically.

Marc

Thank you Crewbaby, your list of iso languages is now included in the alternativenames zip file.

For the other readers :
nah is a language called "Nahuatl". It is included in the newest file Crewbaby sent me.

I have found this paragraph in the "als" wikipedia :

We know. When the Alemannic wikipedia was set up, Alemannic had no
code and since it was the Alsatian edition back then, als was
chosen. Recently we got a code (gsw), but it is only for Swiss
German and we decided to wait until there is a code for all variants
until we move the domain.

Marc

Geonames has been updated today with the newest nga dump 20060601.

This load was predominantly about Indonesia with nearly 10'000 new records. The modifications are lead by Russia with 1800 records followed by Indonesia with 825:

Code:

 Modifications :
 1799 Russia
 825 Indonesia
 795 Pakistan
 489 North Korea
 413 Mali
 166 Myanmar
 158 Afghanistan
 116 Somalia
 58 Iran
 30 Serbia And Montenegro
 16 China
 9 Peru
 4 India
 3 Taiwan
 2 Kazakhstan
 1 Belgium
 ------------
 4884 total modifications
 
 
 
 Inserts :
 9961 Indonesia
 2897 Russia
 515 Mali
 313 Peru
 113 Myanmar
 105 Pakistan
 19 China
 18 North Korea
 16 Somalia
 7 India
 6 Kazakhstan
 4 Afghanistan
 ------------
 13974 total inserts
 
 
 18858 total inserts and updates

The numbers for the previous load 2006-04-10 are here :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/52.page

Hi Andrew

I am glad it worked. Thanks for sharing the solution with us, other MS SQL users will have it easier now and find the solution here.

Marc

Hi Andrew

Did you try specifying the row terminator explicitly? On windows 'newline' often means '\n\r' wheras the dump files are using '\n'.

Marc