GeoNames (or GeoNames.org) is a user-editable

geographical database A spatial database is a general-purpose database (usually a relational database) that has been enhanced to include spatial data that represents objects defined in a geometric space, along with tools for querying and analyzing such data. Mos ...

available and accessible through various

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

s, under a

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

attribution license. The project was founded in late 2005. The GeoNames dataset differs from, but includes data from, the US Government's similarly named GEOnet Names Server.

Database and web services

The GeoNames database contains over 25,000,000 geographical names corresponding to over 11,800,000 unique features. All features are categorized into one of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one of 645 feature codes. Beyond names of places in various languages, data stored include

latitude In geography, latitude is a geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinate that specifies the north-south position of a point on the surface of the Earth or another celestial body. Latitude is given as an angle that ranges from −90° at t ...

longitude Longitude (, ) is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east- west position of a point on the surface of the Earth, or another celestial body. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees and denoted by the Greek lett ...

elevation The elevation of a geographic location (geography), ''location'' is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational equipotenti ...

, population, administrative subdivision and

postal code A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or numerical digit, digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, inclu ...

s. All coordinates use the World Geodetic System 1984 ( WGS84). Those data are accessible free of charge through a number of Web services and a daily database export.

Wiki interface

The core of the GeoNames database is derived from official public sources, whose quality may vary. Through a

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

interface, users can manually edit and enhance the database by correcting names, updating locations, adding new features, and refining existing entries.

Semantic Web integration

Each GeoNames feature is represented as a web resource identified by a stable URI. This URI provides access, through content negotiation, either to the HTML wiki page, or to a RDF description of the feature, using elements of the GeoNames

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

. This ontology describes the GeoNames features properties using the

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of Knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge representation languages for authoring Ontology (information science), ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe Taxonomy, taxonomies and ...

, the feature classes and codes being described in the SKOS language. Through Wikipedia articles URL linked in the RDF descriptions, GeoNames data are linked to

DBpedia DBpedia (from "DB" for "database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web using OpenLink Virtuoso. DBpedia a ...

data and other RDF Linked Data.

Accuracy and improvements

As in other

crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...

schemes, GeoNames edit interface allows everyone to sign in and edit the database, hence false information can be entered and such information can remain undetected especially for places that are not accessed frequently. studies these inaccuracies and classifies them into loss in the granularity of coordinates (e.g., due to truncation and low-resolution geocoding in some cases), wrong feature codes, near-identical places, and the placement of places outside their designated countries. Manually correcting these inaccuracies is both tedious and error-prone (due to the database size) and may require experts. The literature provides very few works on automatically resolving them. study the problem of automatically detecting the scope of locations in a geographical database and its applications in identifying inconsistencies and improving the quality of the database. Computing the boundary information can help detect inconsistencies such as near-identical places and the placement of locations such as cities under wrong parents such as provinces or countries. Singh and Rafiei show that the boundary information derived in their work can move more than 20% of locations in GeoNames to better positions in the spatial hierarchy and the accuracy of those moves is over 90%.

References

External links