GeoNames is switching from the original SRTM data provided by NASA to the processed srtm v4.1 data provided by cgiar. The extract files now contain srtm data where available and gtopo30 elsewhere.

SRTM is digital elevation model from 56° S to 60° N in a three arcsecond (90 m) resolution. The original data provided by NASA contains small holes of no data over water bodies, mountainous regions and desertic regions. Andy Jarvis and Edward Guevara of the CIAT Agroecosystems Resilience project (CGIAR), Hannes Isaak Reuter (JRC-IES-LMNH) and Andy Nelson (JRC-IES-GEM) have further processed the original DEMs to fill in these no-data voids. This involved the production of vector contours and points, and the re-interpolation of these derived contours back into a raster DEM.  The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for sustainable development to reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience.

GeoNames has been kindly granted permission to use the processed srtm data. In exchange CGIAR has been given complimentary access to the premium web services. Thanks to Andy Jarvis and all the others involved.

srtm3 elevation for N46 E8 in the Swiss Alps - void areas in red

srtm3 v4.1 N46 E8 in the Swiss Alps - no data voids filled by cgiar

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* US BGN=Formerly FIPS PUB 10-4

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There are two new flags in the alternate name edit tool:
isHistoric for names of the past that are no longer used.
isColloquial for slang and colloquial names

At the recent Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers is was discussed how GeoNames could be extended to improve support for the timeline. Some attributes under consideration:
- fromPeriod (date, year, decade, century or period of usage)
- toPeriod
- source (book or map where the name is used), publication date of the source
- notes

The discussion for these fields is still ongoing and any feedback is welcome.
The two new flags isColloquial and isHistoric are not yet included in the daily extract as we will probably add some more attributes and don’t want to change the extract files too often. Each change in the extact files breaks the import scripts of users. We will extract the records with the two new flags in separate files as a temporary workaround till everything is stable.

A new attribute ‘rank‘ has been added to the xml and json responses. It gives an indication of the popularity or relevancy of an article. The rank is an integer number from ‘1‘ for the least popular articles to ‘100‘ for the most popular articles. It is calculated from the number of links pointing to an article and the article length. The articles are more or less evenly distributed over the 100 ranks.

The ‘elevation‘ field is now filled for nearly all articles, where no elevation could be parsed from the article itself it was enhanced with a reverse geocoded value from srtm3 or aster. The ‘countryCode‘ coverage has also been improved. The attributes ‘population‘ and ‘elevation‘ are no longer set to ’0′ for unknown values, they are left empty instead.

reverse geocoding requests in January 2011

Smartphones make about half of the calls. While Android with 150M reverse geocoding calls is leading ahead of the iPhone with 100M calls, the iPhone covers a larger area.

Android

iPhone

Comparing Android vs iPhone we have found that Andoid is leading in Northern Europe, the United States and India. The iPhone is extremly popular on the Arabian peninsula and many megacities.

Android (green) vs iPhone (red)

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free web service user agents, January 2011

The new domain api.geonames.org will now host the free web services. It requires that the mandatory parameter username=<geonames username> be appended to all requests. You can register a username here.
The domain ws.geonames.org domain will remain operational for a grace period to allow applications to update to the new domain.
We know it is a hassle to have to change the call, but the load and performance problems on the free servers have become unacceptable and need to be addressed.

In order to improve the performance on the free servers we had to reduce the radius upper limit for the findNearbyPostalCodes and the findNearbyWikipedia services. The default radius was also reduced.

Despite the new system we are still looking for Sponsors to help cope with the costs of running the free services. The more sponsors the more requests can be handled.

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datapointed.net

Also interesting to note, besides their pure beauty, are some artifacts (for instance a band in Ireland with lower feature density) clearly visible on the visualizations. Some of them (like the US-Canadian border) are caused by different data providers (usgs vs geobase) and therefore different feature density or feature type assignment. Others are caused by the data entry process itself. A lot of GeoNames data is coming from paper maps and you can see in some areas the form of the original maps used as data source.

Three new countries came into being after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in October 2010. Curaçao and Sint Maarten became countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands whereas Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius became special municipalities of the Netherlands proper.  ISO assigned the code BQ to the three BES islands, which results in the following table:

The island of Saint Martin is divided into the French northern part (MF) and the Dutch southern part (SX). The French northern part seceded from Guadeloupe in 2007.

Note: The newly assigned ISO code ‘BQ’ may cause some issues as it was already in use in the past. Till 1979 it referred to the British Antarctic Territory (codes BQ, ATB) before it was merged with Antarctica (AQ).

The properties ‘nearby’ and ‘neighbour’ have been implemented inline within the feature document for the Premium Data Subscription.

Changes:

• add and use ‘gn’ namespace gn=”http://www.geonames.org/ontology#&#8221; for GeoNames Ontology properties
• add namespace rdfs=”http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#&#8221;
• add new property rdfs:isDefinedBy
• change proprietary property gn:name to be subproperty of rdfs:label
• change proprietary property gn:alternateName to be subproperty of skos:altLabel
• new gn:officialName for alternate names with ‘isPreferred’ flag
• new gn:shortName for alternate names with ‘isShort’ flag
• new parentCountry
• new parentADM(1-4)
• implemented ‘nearby’ (within the document, only available with the Premium Data Subscription)
• implemented ‘neighbour’ (within the document, only available with the Premium Data Subscription)

7. Oct Update: The current version is 2.2.1 and fixes some issues with name properties in v2.2. Version 2.2 is deprecated.