Ask HN: Database with country names down to the city, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093005

by wenbert • 16 years ago

9 12 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hello HN,

I remember reading these in HN a few months ago. Apparently they were free. They had coordinates, country names, cities, towns, etc.

Can anyone point me to a reliable site with a good database for such?

Thanks!

-Wenbert

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

hey Wenbert,

I've got one, let me dig it up for you, just a moment.

edit:

Ok, ready for download, it's a mysql dump so you can simply read it back in to any mysql server:

http://autotagger.com/geoinfo.dump.gz

41 Megabytes, 2.67 million towns & cities, fields are country, region,name,accented name,latitude,longitude,verified,current,prefered and population.

The 'verified', 'current' and 'prefered' fields are all internal to an application I wrote so you can lose those safely.

I've also added tables with countries, country aliases and regions.

edit2: holy guacamole, easy guys, that server is only on a 100 Mbit uplink.

I figured there'd be one download...

wenbert5• 16 years ago

Thanks! What about for updates? How do you regularly update your data?

LOL. It downloaded in about a minute. Nice server!

Again, thank you so much!

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

This is a hybrid of a public dataset and a lot of manual polishing to get rid of duplicates (no doubt there are a still quite a few of those, especially in Asia).

I don't actively maintain the dataset, but if you want I can create a small website around it so people can update it.

The reason I built this was a project called 'autotagger', the idea behind it is to identify people, places and subjects in texts automatically.

It's one of my pet projects but I don't have enough funds to continue to work on it full time without a way to monetize it, so it's been sitting there rusting for the last year or so.

I think I have most of the datastructures and algorithms worked out, it needs a massive rewrite to get it production ready and fast enough.

The fields most subject to change are the population and the names, cities/towns don't get created too often but merging smaller towns does happen.

They rarely move around, so I figure the longitude/latitude should be good for a while ;)

kyro• 16 years ago

Thanks a ton, jacquesm.

This would've been very useful for a past project, and while I don't necessarily need it at the moment, I suspect it'll come in handy sometime in the future.

gyardley• 16 years ago

The one we used for our analytics product came from here:

http://www.geonames.org/export/

wenbert5• 16 years ago

Thanks again! I will compare this with jacquesm's file.

wenbert5• 16 years ago

I have found the link in HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530086

bquinn• 16 years ago

http://www.geonames.org/ (download area at http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/)

Used as the placename source for http://www.dopplr.com among others.

HTH,

Brendan.

ratsbane• 16 years ago

Not exactly to your requirements but related: we use the MaxMind GeoLite city database to correlate IPs with lat/lon and city/country names. It's free (the GeoLite version; the pay version has a little more detail but doesn't cost very much) and simple to update and use.

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

Ask HN: Database with country names down to the city, etc.

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