40 million web service calls in May

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.“

Italian communities – Istat.it

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.