GeoNames Forum

Hey,

is there a reason why only some zip codes are available as alternate names ?
Is it a goal to make them all available as zip codes ?

thanks,
sami

Actually, I think the feature could be done totally outside of geonames.
It would be pretty easy (but kinda boring..) to take 2 dumps, import them to different db/tables, and then create a diff between the two.

and the diff could be used to update production servers once every X days/weeks/months.

I confirm I see the U+009C character in the middle of feature 2994458's ASCII name.

Looks like U+009C is a control character : "String terminator".

So, I believe the dump has a problem regarding this.

sami

OK great ! thank you marc!

if you discover whatever issue with the file, don't hesitate to report it, I'll correct !

sami

Does it mean the CS country should be removed from the country file now?

sami

If it can help, here's my view :

According to wikipedia, A "country is a political division of a geographical entity".

So, I think american samoa definitely is a country according to this definition. We're not talking about state/nation here.

So, it would definitely make sense to attach it to oceania instead of north america, no matter what the links between american samoa and the US are.

See http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/910.page#4066 for the details of the merge

BTW... after deleting CS : Serbia and Montenegro, I realized that some ADMS are linked to this country... (and probably some features too)

Since the country does not exist anymore, how are we supposed to handle the case... ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbia_and_Montenegro

In the meanwhile, here is the exact same file, but with serbia and montenegro

http://www.sirika.com/data/mergedWithCs.tsv

PS: since Serbia and montenegro is not present in the dumped country file, it means that some data is definitely out of sync....

Hi marc,

I promised a looong time ago to merge the two country files so that you can fix the countryInfo.txt export, and we should be able to get rid of the 2 separate country files.

After a *really* long vacation, I did it. here is the file :
http://www.sirika.com/data/merged.tsv

Some remarks :
It contains the data of the exported dump when it is available, and the data of the other file otherwise.

Basically, the changes I did to the CVS country file, were :
1] deletion of Serbia and montenegro (CS)
2] addition of BL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Barth%C3%A9l%C3%A9my)
3] Addition of MF (Saint Martin : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Martin_(France))
4] For some reason, the equivalentFipsCode 'FI' of Aland Islands
was in the neighbours column, so I fixed that...

I set the TLD of BL and MF to .gp, since they seem to have an officially assigned one that is not used.. Wikipedia says that .gp and .fr are used instead. So, I am not sure of what to do... I went with .gp for now...

Just tell me if you need anything else to fix the export, so we can get rid of the duplication....

OK, I'll work on merging the files this week and post the resulting work.

Hi,

you recently added Saint Martin & Saint Barthelemy to the country list.
I can see the 2 new countries in http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt, but not in http://geonames.cvs.sourceforge.net/geonames/data/countries.txt?revision=1.12&view=markup

Can you tell me what the current policy is concerning these two files ? Which one is supposed to be the most complete one ?

If neither file is complete, do you want me to produce a merged version ?

Hi,

in a recent blog entry (http://geonames.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/geotree-hierarchical-toponym-browser/), you wrote about the GeoTree widget displaying flags from wikipedia.

How did you do the mapping between the flag names and the ADM codes ?

Is the mapping data with the flags bundle available ?

thanks,
sami dalouche

Hi,

not sure if this can help you, but :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/782.page

regards,
sami dalouche

If it can help you troubleshoot the problem, the features that behave like #1128216 are all of those which do not have any asciiname in the dump. (null or empty string)

Hi,

I am wondering which name the 'name' attribute in the features dump actually refers to. Is it the preferred name ? The short one ? The NGA/american preferred name ?

What looks weird to me is that some arabic cities have a westernish name (like Algiers : http://www.geonames.org/2507480/algiers.html), and others, like feature #1128216 : http://www.geonames.org/1128216/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%AD-%D8%A2%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AF.html have a name in arabic).

Thanks,
sami