GeoNames Forum

Hi,

concerning IoC codes.. This page contains useful information, for anyone interested..
http://www.statoids.com/wab.html

Sami Dalouche

Hi,

haven't forgotten my promise. just going to play with the files in the next few days, it's just that I'm late, as usual

currently messing with other technical problems

1] For the FIPS code, I'm still searching for a better solution as mainFipsCode, since it is pretty much inelegant (though better than nothing)
2] I am thinking of externalizing the languages to another table/file than the country one. Then, there could be a (type/id) pair, where type = country / adm, and id = country code / adm code. We would have no data for adms right now, but at least, the schema would allow it

This file could also contain any kind of statistical data we have, concerning the % of people speaking the language, etc..

Will soon come back to you

Sami Dalouche

marc wrote:

In the long run it would also be nice to have the languages not only per country, but also per province/state (ISO 3166-2).

Marc

Hi,

OK, I am thinking about the way to handle FIPS codes correctly, and will provide a corrected countryInfo.txt

Another thing.. Concerning the languages. If we start adding more information about the languages (such as the % of population who speak the language), I am more in favor of adding a new table/file.. Something like a ManyToMany relationship between language codes and countries, with additional columns adding the informations. Adding stuff between parentheses, etc, does not really help parsing the files..

Anyways, I'll provide files in the next few days.

Another problem...

In Adm1 :

RI.RI

But the RI iso code does not exist in Countries.txt....

Actually, It does exist in ISO 3166 :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

RI Indonesia

and country.txt info says
ID IDN 360 ID Indonesia Jakarta 1919440.0 241973879 AS id,jv,su

...

Concerning FIPS.. I'm not sure what to do exactly... What would be possible is to have an additional column indicating whether the current entry is the main one.. So, we would have 2 FI entries, but one would be primary = true, while the other one would be primary = false ... ?

Because.. When you have GNS Cities.. They refer to FIPS codes. So, if you want to import the data into a strongly-typed database, you have to decide to which Country entity you are going to link it to.. And in this case, it should be finland, not the island....

Concerning China.. It's true that 235 is a lot of languages, but actually, when you think about it, it's not that much.. China accounts for 1 billion people, which is 1/6th of the planet's population.....

Regards,
Sami Dalouche

Oops, forgot to login to write the last post. Anyways, it was mine

Anonymous wrote:

Hi,

We are currently creating a start-up that will make use of the Geonames dataset to locate cities. Geonames will be the first open source project we give money to, as soon as we make some (We use quite a lot of Open source stuff, and will give money back whenever we can : "We love open source because it is open source, not just because it's free"). Once we have money, I have nothing against buying support / updates / whatever concerning Open Source.

My worry was about the project's goal. I completly understand the fact that any community-driven project goes wherever the community wants it to go. I just wanted to make sure about the good intentions

Concerning my contribution to Geonames: The first thing I might be able to contribute is a list of Wines (crus) associated to their respective cities. (It is not currently associated to cities, only zipcodes, so there might be some work involved..) (so that people can easily GIS localize wines..). Concerning INSEE Names, well, I am currently (struggling to/working on) to get Lucene/Compass to work correctly and efficiently, in order to index all the city names. Once all this is working, fuzzy-matching INSEE Names against All possible names of each PPL feature should give pretty good results. I'll spend some time hacking on that once my search engine works

In any case, if I do some programming tasks that might be useful for Geonames, I'll for sure contribute it.

Regards,
Sami Dalouche

Hi,

Something I am wondering about is the goal of the Geonames Project. Does it aim at staying a 100% Free, not-for-profit organization, that gives away its database, source code, etc, or does it plan to become a commercial project at some point, keeping some data from the public and only opening a [restricted] WS access ?

In fact, my main worry is that the available database dumps contain all the cities, and GIS features, but do not contain the references to the external sources (for instance, for each feature, we only have the geonamesId, not the GNIS FeatureID). So we don't know which feature is a GNS one, which feature comes from another website, etc.
This means that if one day, geonames.org becomes commercial, it means all geonames users have no way to fork and continue to update the system...

So, it is really weird, because on the one side, I see that there is some source code (only client side though for now) available for free, and some data available for free, but on the other side, I wonder what the plans are..

Thanks,
Sami Dalouche