GeoNames Blog

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.

Around 10.000 Brazilian populated places and all 5.561 municípios have been the subject of the latest geonames bulk update. The data set is from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia Estatística (IBGE) and has kindly been provided by Edmar Moretti from the Ministério do Meio Ambiente.

Brazil is a federation consisting of twenty-six states (estados) and one federal district (distrito federal), making a total of 27 first order administrative divisions. There are 5.561 second order administrative divisions or municípios. Minas Gerais (MG) is the state with the largest number of municípios (853) and Roraima (RR) has the lowest number (15). The Distrito Federal has only one município.

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

If you know about interesting free data sets from your country, please let us know. We are eager to integrate them.

Kolossos has drawn a Feature Density Map with the GeoNames data set. The bright parts of the map show high density areas sporting a lot of features per km² and the dark parts show regions with no or only few GeoNames features.

Dense regions are Bosnia Herzegowina (1.008 features per km²) , Germany (0.447), North Korea (0.318), Pakistan (0.154) and the east coast of the US.

The dark spots mainly indicate unihabited areas and it is thus interesting to compare the Feature Density Map with the Population Density Map compiled by NASA in 1994 :

It shows that India (0.0114) and China (0.0113) have surprisingly few GeoNames features compared to their high population density.

The source code and a large image is available on wikimedia.org.

[more geonames feature statistics]

Around 6000 populated places in the Czech Republic have been updated with a free dataset collected by Czech GRASS users.

We have updated latitude and longitude, the population and the Kraj (region) of the places. In average we have moved the places by 0.8 km.

Thanks to Klokan Petr Pridal for his help.

With the newest load we have added French to the languages for which geonames supports wikipedia fulltext search and text blurbs. These features are now available in English, German, French, Spanish and Polish.
The total number of entries since July has increased from 230,000 to 500,000, an increase of 117%. The number of entries in English has increased from 53,000 to 81,000 (52%) and the number of entries in German from 38,000 to 51,000 (26%). Other languages are catching up. Dutch, French and Italian also have around 50,000 geolocated entries.

You find detailed numbers on the geonames wikipedia page :

wikipedia-2006-nov.html

The numbers of previous months are available here :

wikipedia-2006-july-15.html

wikipedia-2006-april-23.html

wikipedia-2006-march-05.html

wikipedia-2006-feb-21.html

Searching for geographical names with your web browser has now become even easier. We have added an OpenSearch description to geonames that allows you to directly search the geonames database from your browsers search bar. OpenSearch is supported by Firefox 2.0 and InternetExplorer 7.
Installation of this small plugin is very simple. Just go to the geonames home page and open the drop down list of your search bar. You will see an option add “geonames”. Select this option and the geonames search engine will be added to your search bar. From now on you can just type into your browsers search bar to search for geographical names.

We have updated the geonames database with Airports. The IATA (International Air Transport Association) and ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) codes have been added as alternate names.

With this update it is now possible to search for Airport codes like LTN (Luton), LHR (London Heathrow) or LGW (London Gatwick).

With feedback and help from the blogosphere we have updated the geonames ontology and fixed some flaws in the corresponding web service. The ontology now includes linked data such as contains (administrative divisions), neighbours (for features with a boundary) or nearby features. The web service is using two URIs to clearly distinguish between Concept (the thing as is) and Document (the document about it).

Concept vs Document

In the Semantic Web an URL is not just an URL. Four uses of an URL can be identified : the name of the URL, the concept the URL stands for (the thing as is), the web location and the document instance. It is important to clearly distinguish between the concept and the document instance about it. In the Geonames Semantic Web we use these URIs for Berlin:

[1] http://sws.geonames.org/2950159/
[2] http://sws.geonames.org/2950159/about.rdf

If you want to express the fact that you are living in Berlin you use the first URI [1], if you want to make a remark about the information geonames has about Berlin then you use the latter [2].

The geonames web server is configured to return a 303 (See Other) redirection response for a request of [1] the URI for the concept and give [2] as the new location of the document. This is one way how the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) of the W3C has decided to resolve the ambiguity between concept and document and this is also how Tim Berners-Lee has asked us to resolve it. The other accepted way to remove the ambiguity is the use of hashes in the URI.

Future Work

Wit the new linked data (contains,neighbours,nearby) the toponyms are now interlinked with each other and the geonames semantic web has become a real Web. With over 6 million toponyms there are over 6 million ways to enter the Geonames Semantic Web. However, there is currently not a single way to leave it once you have entered it. It has become a huge “Black Hole“.
A next step will be to add links to other resources in the geospatial semantic web domain. Bernard is involved in the design and development of a Semantic Web implementation for the French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE) and we will link the Geonames Resources with their corresponding resources in the INSEE Semantic Web. It will thus be possible to follow the link from the Geonames toponym to the INSEE.
What other Geospatial Semantic Web Resources should Geonames link to? We are looking forward to your comments.

Thanks to the Geonames Ontology, contributed by Bernard Vatant, all geonames features now have a RDF description for the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web aims to bring structure to the Web and make its content easily readable by machines. The semantic web is sometimes referred to as Web3.0.
The balloon on the geonames map display has received two new menus for ‘perma link’ and ’semantic web rdf’.
Harry Chen has a good introduction to the Geonames Ontology on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog. Richard Cyganiak writes in his blog “This is an excellent example of a Semantic Web site done right. Well, almost right …” and in an other posting he describes how to use the Semantic Web URI of a geonames feature with a FOAF file : … it lets me navigate from my profile up the geographical hierarchy from the city of Berlin to the federal state of Berlin to the country of Germany to the continent of Europe.

The Statistical Office of the Swiss Canton of Zurich has contributed a geo data-set to the geonames project with 5347 settlements in the Canton of Zurich. Together with aggregated records this results in the following feature codes :

1069 PPL
537 PPLX
1941 PPLL (settlements with two to four buildings)
1821 HSE (settlements with only one building)

The data can be viewed with googlemaps or GoogleEarth.

With this new data-set the number of toponyms in Switzerland is doubling and in the feature statistic country ranking Switzerland jumped from rank 145 to rank 106, just ahead of the Solomon Islands.

We hope this is just a first step and other governmental agencies in Switzerland will follow suit and also release geo-data to the public domain.

[more information in German]