GeoNames Blog

The Popfly development team have produced a funny tutorial over the holidays where the team members play the roles of the Popfly blocks (modules). In the video they create a facebook mashup to display facebook friends on Virtual Earth. GeoNames is used to geocode the friend’s locations.

GeoNames is a handy web service that will find the longitude and the latitude for a given location.

via go2web20 blog and John Montgomery

see also our blog posting on the initial Popfly release.

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.

Multimap has announced today the integration of GeoNames data into their services. GeoNames data on multimap is updated once per day and available with the multimap search on the website as well as with the multimap API. Multimap invites their users to “visit the GeoNames site to add new places, change a wrong location or add alternative names”.

Multimap is one of the earliest and largest internet mapping providers. According to some sources it is the largest online mapping site followed by google maps.

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.

Microsoft released Popfly, a new mashup tool, in private alpha today. There are around 50 predefined blocks which can be dragged to the design surface where the blocks are connected to create a new mashup. Popfly is kind of a foolproof, slick version of Yahoo! pipes based on the Silverlight browser plugin. For geocoding there is a predefined block GeoNames to access geonames.org web services. Here a screen shot from the tutorial :

The GeoNames block supports five operations, all of which are restricted to the US:

1. getLatitudeAndLongitude : geocoding, returns lat/lng
2. lookupOnPlaceName : geocoding, returns lat/lng and place info
3. lookupOnZipCode : geocoding with zipcode
4. lookupOnCityState : geocoding with US state and city
5. lookupOnLatitudeLongitude : reverse geocoding (findNearbyPostalCodes)

TechCrunch writes about Popfly : “Microsoft are the latest entrants in this market, and they have completely leapfrogged every other application we have seen so far.“

John Montgomery, the GPM of Popfly, is blogging about the Genesis of Popfly.

Watch the demo screen cast to see how easy it is to geocode the location of twitter users and display it on VirtualEarth. (WMV, Quicktime)
Not only if Popfly a funny toy it also has the potential to help web service providers monetize their services. It is still difficult if not impossible to combine web services with advertisements. A centralized mashup platform like Popfly could include ads in the presentation layer and share revenues with the mashup creator and the web service providers. Is Popfly going to be the google adsense killer the world is desperately waiting for?