- GeoNames
GeoNames is a geographical data base available and accessible through various
Web services , under aCreative Commons attribution license.Data base and Web services
The GeoNames database [ [http://www.geonames.org GeoNames web site] ] contains over 8,000,000 geographical names corresponding to over 6,500,000 unique features. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature codes. Beyond names of places in various languages, data stored include
latitude ,longitude , elevation, population, administrative subdivision andpostal code s. All coordinates use theWGS84 system (World Geodetic System 1984).Those data are accessible free of charge through a number of Web services [ [http://www.geonames.org/export/ GeoNames web services] ] and a daily database export. The Web services include direct and reverse
geocoding , finding places through postal codes, finding places next to a given place, and findingWikipedia articles about neighbouring places.Wiki interface
The core of GeoNames data base is provided by official public sources, of which quality may vary. Through a
wiki interface, users are invited to manually edit and improve the data base by adding or correcting names, move existing features, add new features ...Semantic Web integration
Each GeoNames feature is represented as a Web resource identified by a stable
URI . This URI provides access, throughcontent negotiation , either to the HTML wiki page, or to aRDF description of the feature, using elements of the GeoNames ontology [ [http://www.geonames.org/ontology GeoNames ontology] ] . This ontology describes the GeoNames features properties using theWeb Ontology Language , the feature classes and codes being described in theSKOS language.Through Wikipedia articles URL linked in the RDF descriptions, GeoNames data are linked toDBpedia data and other RDFLinked Data .APIs
* [http://www.geonames.org/source-code/ Java]
* [http://geonames.edesign.no/ Drupal]
* [http://search.cpan.org/~perhenrik/Geo-GeoNames/lib/Geo/GeoNames.pm Perl]
* [http://nicolas.lamirault.free.fr/projects/cl-geonames/ Lisp]
* [http://www.tbcn.ca/ruby_geonames Ruby]
* [http://www.zindep.com/blog-zindep/Geoname-python/ Python]
* [http://exogen.case.edu/projects/geopy/ Python (geopy)]References
External links
* [http://www.geonames.org GeoNames]
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