GeoNames Forum

Hi,

I am looking for a POI database or non-place database such as landmarks and I have noticed that you are using Wikipedia for entries not found in your database. I have tried to find a way on Wikipedia to access this information without any success. Could anybody help on this one or reefer to other service?

Thanks

Per.

Hi Per

I dont' know of anything better then geonames. If you find a public domain POI database please let me know and I will integrate the dataset in geonames.

As of now geonames has a total of 885.331 spot features. Details on the statistics page :
http://www.geonames.org/statistics/total.html

Wikipedia is rather unstructured and the number of geo located entries is limited (some ten-thousands). The feature type encoded in the geo location tag of wikipedia is often plain wrong as many users copy paste the tag from an other entry and are not aware of the encoded meaning.

Marc

Marc,

Thanks for your reply. Being somewhat new at geocoding I have been unclear in my question. Besides geocoding I am looking for a way to put geocoded namepalces and point of interest in relation to each other.

To make it clearer; I am for example at a tube station in London looking for hotels within walking distance of the tube station. I want to be able to query a database (or download references to add to a table in a MySQL DB) containing longitude and latitudes of places and points of interest and be able to build relationships between the points. Another problem is how to define areas like “Bayswater” and what is contained within.

Would appreciate any help or tips on how to solve this.

Per

I am afraid, I don't have an easy solution ready for you. You could try the services of commercial POI vendors like maporama or mapquest.
If your application is a local solution (for London or other cities) it could be better to use a POI provider specializing in this particular area.

Marc

Marc,

We are ready to add belgian companies in your database(s). How can we do this programmatically ?

Say for example that we know for sure that "Lato Sensu Management" is located exactly at 50.3854993,4.6583006 and we know also that its NACE code (200

is 62020, how can we add this to the database?

Best regards,
Pat