GeoNames is ...aggregator of free geo data

I am ...Marc Wick

self employed software engineer, Switzerland

GeoNames“Under the Hood: How GeoNames Aggregates

many Sources into One Data Set“

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GeoNames Feature Density Map

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GeoNames - Gazetteer

Pragmatic, useful, ease of useOver 6.5 million features Cc-by licence9 feature classes

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Screen shot Berlin

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Origins and Goal

Proprietary applicationTeam up togethercontribute modifications to central data base.applications switch to GeoNames from proprietary aggregation

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Challenge

A lot of data IS availableMany providersLanguagesScripts

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GeoNames Ambassadors

GeoNames contactSpeak local languageKnow local situation

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Data Sources

National Mapping AgenciesStatistical OfficesPostal codesNational Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) ‏Applications using GeoNames− Data files− Manual modifications

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US vs Europe

US data is freely availableEuropean data is not availableRest 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

GeoNamesSuper national mapping agenciesSuper national organisations

INSPIRE

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Problems and Solutions I

Shape / GMLDatum reprojection

FWTools/ GDAL/OGRPostgis/epsg/native tools/custom impl

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Problems and Solutions II

FeatureCodes not 1:1non-ASCIICountry codesAdmin1 codes

Pattern matchingTransliteration

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Place name matching

GeocodingDistancefeature type and feature codeReverse geocoding, compare name similarity− levenshtein distance− letter pair similarity

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Wikipedia GeoTemplates

Proliferation of GeoFormatsNo consensus, AnarchyExamples− <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 : BerlinoEnglish : BerlinArabic : نيلربKorean :���Thai : เบอรลินRussian : БерлинChinese :��Marathi : बर् लि न... (ca 100 names)‏

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Postal codes

Geocode – postal code numeric distanceAccuracy, completeness

ScribbleMaps by Robert Kosara

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Data Dump

Flat csv filesSimple formatEase of useFull daily dumpdaily modificationsrdf

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Web Services

Search− Ranking

Tf idfRelevancy

− I18n

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Hierarchy Web Services

HierarchyChildNeighbour Sibling

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Gto

po30

SRTM

3

JDBC

Database : Postgres(postgis) ‏

Lucene

Full Text IndexTF-IDF

Tomcat (Java) ‏

Apache

mod rewrite

JSONjdom.org (xml) ROME (RSS)‏ ‏

JMSactiveMQ

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Libraries

JavaDrupalRubyPhpPerlPythonLisp

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Synchronization

Dail dumpDaily modificationJms

Rdf dump, periodically

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Linked Data

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Applications using GeoNames

thousands of applicationssearchSite navigationgeo-coding

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Thank you for your attention.