GeoNames Blog

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 …

Gipuzkoa is a territory in northern Spain, with its own parliament, part of the autonomous region of the Basque Country. It’s located in the westernmost part of the Pyrenees, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, in the borderline between France and Spain. It’s surface is around 2,000 km2 and nearly 700,000 inhabitants.

The geographic data of the region has just been greatly enhanced in Geonames. Nearly 250 locations have been corrected (moved to exact positions, and official and alternate names have been added, mostly in Basque), and other 750 new records were added, populated places most of them. The data set is from the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, the local administration, and has been kindly provided by the officials in charge of the local public Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), the B5M office, as it is called there.

Previously, Gipuzkoa’s places looked like this in Geonames:

A regular distribution pattern of some scarce populated places, due to rounded coordinates of old gazetteers. And only Spanish names appeared, despite Basque forms being the official ones for 20 years or so. Now, that region appears like this:

More places, updated Basque official names show first (Spanish names haven’t been deleted, they remain there as alternate form), and exact locations. In the case of municipalities, for instance, latitude and longitude are those of the town hall.

This addition follows the path of another public data upload we had recently, that one from Brazil. It is encouraging when public administrations decide to share their data openly, as in these cases. At the same time, this is the way to avoid embarrassing situations like outdated data appearing in online maps, as the Hitler-berg case shows. If you know about interesting free data sets from your country, please let us know. We are eager to integrate them.

The records of this load have been locked for updates by the anonymous user as this official SDI body is definitely a trustworthy data source.

Many thanks for this update to Luistxo from Eibar, Spain. Luistxo is a big help for geonames in particular with Basque place names and minority languages.

There is an interesting article on SPIEGEL Online today about the naming of a German hill on GoogleEarth. The hill Heiglkopf near Bad Tölz was renamed to ‘Hitler-Berg‘ in 1933, the very year Hitler took over power, and kept this name till the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. This is also the name GoogleEarth was displaying for the hill up to today much to the dismay of local authorities.

Lesson learnt : If local authorities want to be sure their places are properly named on the geospatial web then they should not hesitate to make the information freely available. If they continue to ask exorbitant prices for their data that not even Google can afford to pay for it, whom do they expect to be able to do so?

Google is asking for feature requests for the Google Maps API. One request is for ‘Compatibility with other map APIs‘.

Following the lead of Google several other vendors are now also offering web map APIs. All these javascript based APIs have similar features but are unfortunately incompatible with each other. A switch from one vendor to the other requires rewriting most of the mapping code in your application. There are open source projects like mapstraction or myMap that try to solve this problem with adding an additional layer on top of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Wouldn’t it be better if the map API vendors (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Mapquest and even the open source API openlayers) could directly agree on a common API? With a common API you could switch from one map vendor to the other by simply changing a single javascript import statement.

You are investing a lot of time in writing code for the Google Maps API and your application depends on it, what are you going to do if Google changes the licence and you are no longer able to use it? If you want to support the request for compatibility between mapping APIs put your name in the requested by field.

The first wikipedia load this year has brought the total number of georeferenced wikipedia articles available on geonames to 611,758. English will soon cross the magic number of 100,000 (current=99,333) after 81,282 in November.

Thumbnail images for wikipedia articles are a new experimental addition to the geonames webservices, the full text search and the maps mashup. Around a third of all articles on geonames have thumbnail images. A simple algorithm determines which image to use as thumbnail if more than one image could be parsed from the original article.

Geonames has yesterday become victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack by a semantic web crawler. I had to block the IP addresses of the network segments used by the crawler to keep the site operational. The crawler was fetching the RDF representation of geonames features in bursts from up to 16 different IP addresses concurrently and our servers were not able to deal with this additional load.

Frédérick Giasson has blogged this week about why the use of RDF dumps and dereferencable uris are preferable from a crawlers point of view. Danny Ayers continues the thread and asks whether it is really necessary to have a local copy of the full remote database to build a useful semantic web application.

They both don’t mention the data providers point of view, but the preferences are obviously similar. It simply does not make sense to download a huge database record by record if a full dump is available. If you do want to download it record by record then at least follow the basic policy of politeness. From a provider’s point of view the following is important :

• use only a single thread. Definitely don’t use 16 servers concurrently to grab data from a single data provider
• wait some seconds between requests
• make the length of the wait depending on the response time of the previous request. This way you will automatically slow down if the server is busy serving other users and speed up if the server has cycles to spare for you.

The semantic web is suffering from lack of available data since most database owners are reluctant to open their database. I don’t think this attitude is going to change if they have to fear to become a victim of a DDOS attack by a semantic web crawler gone berserk.

In order to protect the geonames website from future denial-of-service attacks on web services we will move the www part to another server. For data synchronization between geonames servers we will use a message architecture. The message cluster architecture has the nice side effect that anybody running a geonames mirror can subscribe to the message topic and synchronize their own geonames mirrors in near real time.

Robert, the creator of ZipScribbleMaps [1][2][3], has added a dozen countries from the geonames postal code data set to his collection of ZipMaps : AT, AU, CA, CH, DE, ES, FR, HU, IT, NL, NO, SE.
ZipScribbleMaps is visualising the organisation of postal codes by connecting postal codes in ascending order and using different colours for different administrative divisions.

Robert has spottet a couple of errors in the geonames data set during this work. Montejo de Bricia for example was erroneously laying in the Bay of Biscay.

In “Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use” over at linuxworld.com Evan Prodromou, one of the two founders of wikitravel.org, lists ten useful Web2.0 APIs :
1. Google Maps API
2. Geonames.org
3. OpenID - Six Apart
4. Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service
5. Amazon EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud
6. Atom API
7. OpenSearch - Amazon A9
8. Open Media Profile - Six Apart
9. MediaWiki API
10. JS-Kit

He writes about geonames : “I prefer the data from Geonames.org, which has a simple REST service for geocoding names, finding locations close to each other, and some other great geographical backend calculations. The Geonames database is one of the best available, based on multiple data sets, and it uses a liberal Creative Commons Attribution license for its data output. It’s also quick and responsive.“

The clear winner in terms of number of APIs on this list is Amazon with three services, followed by Six Apart with two APIs. Amazons strong position is undoubtedly deserved since it offers by far the most innovative and outstanding suite of web service APIs available today.