GeoNames Edit

Geonames.org is a geographic database that contains an extensive collection of information on over eleven million place names - including historical ones - from around the world. These toponyms identify geographical locations such as countries, cities, streets, rivers, lakes, mountains and islands and serve as standardised data thanks to the persistent, unique identifiers. GeoNames.org thus contributes to the standardisation of place names, helps to avoid misunderstandings and uncertainties and enables precise communication about geographical locations.

GeoNames is licensed under a Creative Commons licence and is accessible free of charge via a range of web services and a daily database export. The database contains over 25 million geographic names and consists of over 12 million unique entries, including 4.8 million populated places and 16 million alternative names. All features are categorised into one of nine feature classes and further categorised into one of 645 feature codes.

GeoNames integrates geographic data such as place names in different languages, elevations, populations and other data from various sources. All latitude/longitude coordinates are in WGS84 (World Geodetic System 1984). Users can manually edit, correct and add new names via a user-friendly wiki interface.

GeoNames maintains its own ontology (documentation) to add geographical semantic information to the World Wide Web. All of the more than 11 million GeoNames toponyms have a unique URL with a corresponding RDF web service. Other services describe the relation between toponyms.

@misc{Wick_GeoNames,
  title = {{{GeoNames}}},
  author = {Wick, Marc},
  url = {https://www.geonames.org/}
}