GeoNames Forum

HI, Ive imported allcountries into SQL Server, and Im just looking at the data to see whether it could feasibly replace my current location database.

Im seeing some oddities, such as..

I query for all names where featurecode = 'ADM1' and country = 'GB', which gives me

g_id g_name
----------- -----------------
2634895 Wales
2638360 Scotland
2641364 Northern Ireland
6269131 England

6692244 Midden Engeland
6692245 Noord Engeland
6692246 Noord Ierland
6692249 Oost Engeland

Now the top 4 are great, but the 2nd set appear to be duplicates, except in dutch. Whats worse is I cant seem to find a way to filter those out, all the other fields are very similar.

I would have expected to see the English names, with the dutch ones maybe added as 'alternate names'.

Can anyone advise please? This is only the first example I saw, Im sure there are many others.

Thanks
Carpii

Ive since noticed that the wikipedia search shows a breakdown of place names, in terms of amount per language

Could it be that the Dutch duplicates are marked as Dutch in the database, but this language field isnt output in AllCountries.txt?

If thats the case, is it possible to get the language field added please?

Thanks

Sorry to pester, but does anyone have any advice on this?

It really seems to render the raw data unusable for anything other than anecdotal use.

Im guessing the webservices are using fields which arent necessarily in the raw data, can anyone confirm?

Thanks
Carpii

Carpii

The 2nd set are records that have been added by a user last week. The user mistakenly used the feature code 'ADM1' for the records. I have deleted the entry for Northern Ireland and added a Dutch translation to the existing record. For the other three records I have changed the feature code to RGN (Region) as they are not an administrative region in our model.

Marc

Thanks for the response Mark. I had wondered if it was some data nuance I wasnt aware of, so its good to hear its just a mistake

Another question If I can..
The documentation mentions that if I want to submit amendments to the database, I can do so via the wiki style interface. But all I can find is the google maps style interface. Is this the wiki being referred to?

Im doing a lot of data cleansing from various sources, and the result is that I may have a lot of UK data to submit to your database. Now a lot of it will be duplicates which I can filter out, using AllCountries, but there are also some deletions, and some updates (particularly in relation to county/admin codes)

Is there a way I can submit this data as a single feed, rather than having to update them by hand using google maps?

Thanks
Carpii

Carpii

Yes, the google maps think is the wiki edit interface. You can send me a file and I will update the database with it. Do you think we are allowed to use your data with our cc-by license? For the UK this is a particularly important point.

Cheers

Marc