The Semantic Web, the web of data, is coming of age and making it recently into main stream news coverage. GeoNames was among the first to offer a geographical ontology and RDF web services and GeoNames is also part of the Linked Data project. The Linked Data project brings together data from public sources and builds a web of open and free data where data sets are interlinked with each other. Geographic concepts are referred to using the GeoNames URI with the unique GeoNames Identifier the geoNameId.
[Image : Projects involved in the Linked Data project (Feb 2008, Richard Cyganiak)]
Tim Berners-Lee has written an interesting blog posting about how a misquote from the Times interview spread over the web and could not be stopped. (He also mentions GeoNames.)
GeoNames Blog 
[…] Semantic Web is a technology family (or, a disparate set of sometimes non-related technologies) that allows computing applications to understand each other. It has the potential of transforming the way we do computing in the very near future… and power to make software developers’ lives easier. […]
[…] Semantic Web is a technology family (or, a disparate set of sometimes non-related technologies) that allows computing applications to understand each other. It has the potential of transforming the way we do computing in the very near future… and power to make software developers’ lives easier. […]