GeoNames Blog

As a last posting of this year some personal notes. The past three months I spent in Barcelona invited by Properazzi the world’s largest property search engine to share office space with them.
Barcelona is a marvelous city, with the sea, the mountains, the architecture of the modernisme, the weather (in three months I used the umbrella only once). Public transport in the city in particular the local bike sharing system bicing is great.

You just grab a bike at one of the hundreds of stations and return it at your destination. Though you shouldn’t expect to find an empty slot to return it at one of the beach stations on a sunny day.

Each station has a small real-time map display where you can see the next stations with their availability of empty slots or available bikes. A googlemaps application on the web site helps you plan in advance if you are not certain.

The local language spoken in Barcelona is Catalan. Nevertheless I could brush up my Spanish with some lessons.

Right now I am reading ‘La Sombra del Viento‘. The absolutely marvelous novel is located in Barcelona after the civil war and tells the mysterious and thrilling story of a boy, Daniel, who has adopted a book in the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ and has to protect it for the rest of his life. Soon the novel and the book begin to blend and the book and it’s author will become part of Daniel’s life for years to come.

In order to improve the way GeoNames is organized and account for its increasing complexity we are introducing the role of GeoNames Ambassador.
GeoNames has made huge progress in the last months and is now one of the major geo data providers used by thousands of applications. GeoNames Ambassadors serve as local contact to their country. They speak the local languages and are familiar with the local geo data situation. The importance of GeoNames is increasingly being recognized by national mapping agencies and the formalization of a local contact person will make communication with them easier. You find the first Ambassadors appointments on the team page.

The naming ‘Ambassador’ has been inspired by the Tagzania Diplomatic Service where it was coined by Luistxo who also serves as GeoNames Ambassador to the Basque Country and Gipuzkoa. Thanks to Luistxo’s local contacts we have already been able to integrate an official data set from Gipuzkoa.

I would like to express my thanks to all Ambassadors who have accepted the role as local contact person to their country and are ready to help us improve our data set.

Marc Belzunces, Ambassador to the Catalan Linguistic Area, has more information in his blog (in Catalan).

The awesome google maps mashup ongmap.com has recently won the first price of the Mash up Award 3rd organized by Sun Microsystems Japan. Yuki Naotori, the ongmap founder and developer, is generously sharing part of the prize money with GeoNames and other open source projects and communities ongmap is relying on.
Thanks Yuki.

ONGMAPs mission is to collect a vast range of information about what is at a given location and to make it easily locatable on a map of the world.

Version 0.5 of the GeoNames Webservice Client for Java has been released today. The release includes support for all four administrative levels, a bug fix for the address reverse geocoder, addition of timezone to Toponyms, enumeration for the feature class, and some minor changes.

Java is by far not the only programming language you find GeoNames client libraries for. Some libraries we know about are :

• Java : GeoNames Webservice Client
• Ruby : GeoNams Ruby API
• Perl : Geo-GeoNames
• Python : geopy
• Python : geoname.py by Zindep
• Lisp : cl-geonames
• PHP : SOLMETRA Maps

More administrative levels in GeoNames dump.

We have added two new administrative levels to the GeoNames database dump. The newly released data applies to the administrative divisions of France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, Switzerland, as well as Morocco and is part of our ongoing work on improving administrative data for GeoNames. The GeoNames database has been updated with this information in last weeks and the modifications are therefore not in today’s daily modification file. If you are interested in this information you should get the full dump instead.

We have also updated the isShortName flag for many administrative divisions. The flag isShortName for alternate names helps differentiate between succinct short name and clumsy long names like ‘California’ instead of ‘State of California’. The short names are usually better for display to end users and in search engine friendly urls.

Place Name Hierarchy Webservice :

The ‘children‘ web service returns the administrative divisions contained within a higher level division. You can start with mother earth and go down to the continents, then to the countries on a continent, to the first order administrative divisions of the country and even deeper down for countries with several administrative levels.

The ‘hierarchy‘ service returns the hierarchy for a given toponym. Example : Europe > Switzerland > Zurich

[Documentation of the place name hierarchy web services ]

GeoNames served over 40 million web service calls in May 2007. This is a month-to-month increase of 30% compared to April 2007 where 30 million requests have been served. The daily dumps have been downloaded 16.000 times.

There was a lot of press coverage of the GeoNames project. The popular technology and web2.0 blog TechCrunch has written : “GeoNames answers questions such as: where is a place? what are its coordinates? which region or province does the place belong to? what city or address is near a given GPS latitude/longitude?“

In the wake of the TechCrunch posting several other online magazines have also covered GeoNames. Among them Punto-Informatico in Italy : “Integrare la geografia nel Web semantico diventa così una operazione alla portata di qualunque webmaster.“

PCWorld in Belgium has written in French “Combinez une wikipédia textuelle basée sur des données géographiques avec Google Maps, et vous obtenez un outil fantastique qui va vous étonner: GeoNames.” and in Dutch “De les aardrijkskunde wordt nooit meer hetzelfde!“.

Nate Olson over at Assignment Zero has written a short comparison of OpenStreetMap and GeoNames “Two of the most impressive projects in the mapping space are OpenStreetMap and GeoNames. They approach the world’s geography from opposite directions–from the street-level, upward, on the one hand, and from the country-level, downward, on the other–which makes them nice complements to one another in my mind.“

All 8101 Italian communities are now included in the geonames.org data base as third level administrative divisions ADM3. The twenty regions are ADM1 and the 107 provinces are ADM2. The admin code ADM2 is the two character ISO code and the ADM3 is the six digit Istat code. The first three digits of the Istat code stand for the province.

The data is from GFOSS Italy (Geospatial Free and Open Source Software) based on an old data set provided by Statistics Italy Istat (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica).

The data set from Istat dates back to 1991 and GFOSS in particular Niccolo Rigacci have added the new Provinces and fixed issues with names like wrong accents. They have also setup a media wiki installation to edit and maintain the data. Here the page for Altino with back link to the corresponding geonames entry.

Over 70.000 geocoded hotels have been added to the geonames data base. This new hotel data is provided by various hotel booking systems. So far geonames.org is working together with three hotel booking systems : hotels.com, diytravel and laterooms. Data from other providers will follow.

The information window displayed on top of the map or satellite view has gotten a new tabulator with the hotel address. The address information is also available for other points of interests like the recently added Raiffeisen Bank branches in Switzerland. Included in the daily geonames dump are the name of the hotel, latitude, longitude and all other information available for geonames toponyms. Not yet included is address information. The hotel data addition is part of an ongoing geonames initiative to make more Points Of Interests available.

The challenge in this task was to integrate and match data from various data providers. Names and addresses of hotels as well as data quality may vary dramatically among providers and it is often difficult to figure out whether two hotels are actually the same hotel or not.

Administrative Divisions for the UK are very confusing and it is difficult to find good and reliable resources. This has changed now, thanks to the GeoSemantics team from Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency. The GeoSemantics team, which is part of the OS Research Labs, has released version 0.1 of an Administrative Geography that consists of an ontology describing the different types of administrative divisions and over 11.000 instances. The “OS Administrative Geography” is released under a creative commons license.
The UK is subdivided into 3 countries, 11 Government Office Regions (GOR) ,34 counties, 100 Unitary Authorities, 33 London Boroughs, 36 Metropolitan Districts, 1 Quasi Unitary Authorities, 238 districts and 11.288 parishes. Northern Ireland is not part of this data set since it is mapped by a separate government agency, the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI).

Thanks to Cathy Dolbear, Katalin Kovacs and the rest of the OS GeoSemantics team for releasing this extremely useful data set.

The OS Administrative Geography for the UK is comparable to the “Publication de données géographiques au format RDF” for France by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).

Geonames.org is mapping geonames features to URIs or Ids of local authorities. The geonames RDF represenation for the City of Southampton now contains a link to the Ordnance Survey Id “southampton_00ms” :
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology/v1/AdministrativeGeography.rdf#southampton_00ms

(Update 20 April 2007 : Changed the URL to the Ordnance Survey rdf document. The OS URI have been activated and sightly modified.)

“Geonames machine tags” is a nice idea proposed by Harry Chen in the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog. He suggests to annotate photos with machine tags that point to geonames features using the format “geonames:feature=5352844“. He writes : If flikr’s service is implemented to recognize geonames’s machine tag, then it can pull this semantic description from geonames.org, which is the RDF description about the Golden Gate Bridge. In this document, it describes how Golden Gate Bridge is called in different languages and other geographical information. Read the full posting on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog …

Flickr’s Dan Catt on the geobloggers blog takes up the idea : Now while only a handful of us have the ability to make an implementation of that from the flickr side (upon which I can’t comment, other that to say it sounds like a good idea) …
He then continues describing how the geonames rdf format can easily be transformed into JSON using triplr.org. Read the full posting on Geoblogger.com …