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