GeoNames
“Under the Hood: How GeoNames Aggregates
many Sources into One Data Set“
GeoNames is ...
aggregator of free geo data
I am ...
Marc Wick
self employed software engineer, Switzerland

GeoNames Feature Density Map
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GeoNames - Gazetteer
Pragmatic, useful, ease of use
Over 6.5 million features
Cc-by licence
9 feature classes
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Screen shot Berlin
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Origins and Goal
Proprietary application
Team up together
contribute modifications to central data base.
applications switch to GeoNames from
proprietary aggregation
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Challenge
A lot of data IS
available
Many providers
Languages
Scripts
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GeoNames Ambassadors
GeoNames contact
Speak local language
Know local situation
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Data Sources
National Mapping Agencies
Statistical Offices
Postal codes
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)‫‏‬
Applications using GeoNames
− Data files
− Manual modifications
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US vs Europe
US data is freely available
European data is not available
Rest of the World?
Consequences
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Future of geodata availability
We believe basic geodata will be free in most
countries
Why :
− Economy
− Traffic Policy and Road Safety (road signs)‫‏‬
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Free Availability is only a First Step
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Who aggregates data
GeoNames
Super national mapping agencies
Super national organisations
INSPIRE
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Problems and Solutions I
Shape / GML FWTools/ GDAL/OGR
Datum reprojection Postgis/epsg/native
tools/custom impl
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Problems and Solutions II
FeatureCodes not 1:1 Pattern matching
non-ASCII Transliteration
Country codes
Admin1 codes
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Place name matching
Geocoding
Distance
feature type and feature code
Reverse geocoding, compare name similarity
− levenshtein distance
− letter pair similarity
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Wikipedia GeoTemplates
Proliferation of GeoFormats
No consensus, Anarchy
Examples
− <geo>48 46 36 N 121 48 51 W</geo>
− {{coor d|48.7767|N|121.8142|W|}}
− Berlin : |lat_deg = 52|lat_min = 31
− ... (Any template you could possibly think of is used somewhere)‫‏‬
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Alternate Names
...
Italian : Berlino
English : Berlin
Arabic : ‫نيلرب‬
Korean :
Thai : เบอรลิน
Russian : Берлин
Chinese :
Marathi : बर् लि न
... (ca 100 names)‫‏‬
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Postal codes
Geocode – postal code numeric distance
Accuracy, completeness
ScribbleMaps by Robert Kosara
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Data Dump
Flat csv files
Simple format
Ease of use
Full daily dump
daily modifications
rdf
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Web Services
Search
− Ranking
Tf idf
Relevancy
− I18n
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Hierarchy Web Services
Hierarchy
Child
Neighbour
Sibling
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Apache
mod rewrite
ROME (RSS)‫‏‬ jdom.org (xml)‫ ‏‬JSON
Tomcat (Java)‫‏‬ JMS
activeMQ
Lucene
SRTM3
Gtopo30
JDBC
Full Text Index
TF-IDF
Database : Postgres
(postgis)‫‏‬
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Libraries
Java
Drupal
Ruby
Php
Perl
Python
Lisp
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Synchronization
Dail dump
Daily modification
Jms
Rdf dump, periodically
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Linked Data
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Applications using GeoNames
thousands of applications
search
Site navigation
geo-coding
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Thank you for your attention.
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