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 Blog 