The GeoNames project is a free global geographical database.
The goal of GeoNames is to aggregate free data from various sources and make is available as a database or via a range of web services. Users of GeoNames include Microsoft Popfly, Slide.com, LinkedIn and Tagzania.
The GeoNames gazetteer includes over 8.5 million toponyms for 6.5 million places with 2 million alternate names in up to 200 languages. The information for places covers coordinates, administrative divisions, postal codes, population, elevation, timezone amongst others. GeoNames aggregates data from national mapping agencies, national statistical offices, national postal services as well as the US Army.
GeoNames answers questions such as: where is a place? what are its coordinates? which region or province does the place belong to? what city or address is near a given GPS latitude/longitude? Users of GeoNames typically need the data or web services for travel, real estate, online communities, store locators, vehicle tracking, address verification or applications dealing somehow with geography or maps. In April 2007 GeoNames reported 15,000 downloads of the database and 30 million web service requests.
A wiki style edit interface allows users to correct data and add new place names.
As far as I know, they are the only free web service providing zip code lookup from coordinates. Very valuable service for mapping applications.
This is great. Years ago I paid $5 for a list of ALL us zips codes and their lat/lon values to do a zip code distance search. I have seen lost the data I paid $5 for! But I still have the SQL:
SELECT ‘%s’ as member, a.id, %s, a.address1, a.city, a.state, a.zip, ROUND(
(ACOS(
(SIN(c.lat) * SIN(a.lat)) +
(COS(c.lat) * COS(a.lat) *
COS(a.lon – c.lon))
)
)
* 3963,1
) AS distance
FROM zip c, %s a
where c.zip = ‘%s’ %s
ORDER BY distance, a.firm
Hi Zoltan,
Since they are offering zip code lookups for coordinates, do they have an api the pump’s back this data?
Thanks
the figures are impressive
This data is really cool, you can download it and import it into Google Earth and everything is labeled in detail.
I used coordinates from a different site, but you should get a similar effect.
I was just about to ask if you could move the data into places like Google Earth. This is a fantastic little service. If they have an API then it also has some really interesting mashup potential.
Here is the link to the API: http://www.geon....org/export/#ws
Clean, easy-to-use REST API with JSON and XML result types.
Some of their other unique services are: Elevation by coordinates, RSS to GeoRSS geocoding, nearby Wikipedia entries. Definitely useful for mashups.
In the future years, U.S government won’t look into your porn datas.
But Your great great grand or future children will look back your dna data to find out if you went to porn sites. They want to know why they were born mixed.
Agggghhhh!!!!! people can’t get out of this thing. oh fu*k…. The servers keep records about you.
Thanks alot mike for bring pornotube! This is embrassassing…
Kids will find out if you actually jerk off porn sites.
This is all your faults…
I’m converting to christian forever!!!
http://www.Post...eanywhere.co.uk provide a very library of web services. I have just integrated their International address finder into our site, demo here:
http://www.post.../smartform.aspx
From what I can see it works pretty well, however, it’s not free…
Few years ago I built an application for address parsing and resolution for New Zealand based on data from New Zealand Post and government Land Information database. The DB was quite comprehensive, but incomplete. The idea was to make it learn from user input. It was a good beginning, but my business partner made it with the money and I haven’t heard from him since.
Yesterday I had to make an emergency call to the Fire Service. I was standing on top of a ridge some 30km from the town. Now try explain to a non-local where you are in that situation and where the smoke is coming from.
Postal addresses and ZIP codes are peanuts compared to the way we use to explain locations and navigating in every day life. Even in town.
You ain’t going to say “such and such number / street, level 2″ about a music store. You are most likely to say “A music shop opposite BigMac on High street, somewhere upstairs next to Dymocks bookshop”.
There is a big opportunity for a self-learning address and place name resolution system. Google, MS and Yahoo place name resolution suck.
Anyone to revive my project ?
i love free sites,but almost i dont care wheater it is free.
it no matter!
JLumb said perfect!
it looks preety nice…
Interesting. It’s a great start, and kudos to them for making it available for free. This is actually the sort of thing that potentially would cull thousands of man-hours from our workload. But unfortunately – and understandably, given the scale of their project – the quality of the localization is not up to our standards, so we will continue building our own database, one country at a time.
Our API in Faces allows you to query the same data – we have 8.5 Million places including postal codes, landmarks, man made objexts, mountains lakes, etc etc, the API allows you to ask for the distance between two points, notable things in close proximity to an object and GPS coordinates of all of them.
http://www.face...ingStarted.aspx
You can see some of it in operation at http://www.cleantag.com The Best Geotagging Software for adding Google Earth GPS coordinates to Flickr and faces photos
Seems to a very useful application =O)
Yeah, it is fantastic and it is free.
You can make a donation however and I am sure it will be greatly appreciated.
I haven’t implemented it yet, but once I do, I will be making a big donation cos this will seriously save me an incredible amount of time, effort and money.
Man I love the web!!!
Internet still needs to be connected to the real world…. every time you buy online someone has to find your house and deliver the stuff. And you have to punch in you address first.
As JLumb said – postcode data in the UK isn’t free, but as an upside it is very accurate and always up to date – the venerable Royal Mail makes sure of that with their PAF database.
There are new providers giving access to the data at increasingly affordable prices, have a look at:
http://www.craf...ks.co.uk/prices
and to see a demo:
http://www.craf...cks.co.uk/demos