Stephen - that was my understanding. I wish the UK government was so generous; certainly there appears to be no map data available from any government website...
I think the one thing that this (or any) community can do to add value is to provide a single point of data resources that covers all the decoding required. For example, the US data uses FIPS codes for countries which are different from ISO codes. In addition, they have codes for ADMIN1 areas (states or equivalent first level country divisions) which can be decoded using another file... What is really fascinating me about all the geocoding that is going on is that there is a whole area of research/industrial activity - GIS - which has solved many of the problems that beginners like me are trying to figure out, and yet offerings like google maps still use naive projections that are very poor. On the other hand, there is a whole community of computational linguists who have gotten pretty good at entity extraction (discovering the location in texts of named things like people and places) but who are not so good at grounding their output in interpretations like that which thie uber-list of locations provides. Looks like a big hole to innovate in! Matt On 5/27/05, Stephen Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That data is almost certainly freely available. Most of the US government > departments have to make their materials freely available to Americans, NASA > footage etc is also public domain. > > Although you are probably not an American citizen in any shape or form, I > suspect you would have no problem using the data. The CIA world factbook is > also public domain if you wished to provide some info per country. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matthew Hurst > Sent: 27 May 2005 23:01 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [backstage] World Coordinates - Finally Available. > > I'm curious about the availability of this data. I have been using what I > guess is siimlar data found from starting out at > > http://geonames.usgs.gov/ > > and to save you all the navigation (though it is worth it as there is lots > of > data here), grab the file from > > http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html > > (i.e. the single compressed file) > > which as far as I can tell is still freely available and what is more, > maintained. It is some effort to deal with as there are many locations > with multiple names (you need to test for equality of coordinates to > determine that Tokyo is another name for Edo for example). > > It has 5MM lines in it, of which about 3MM are populated places (PPL > designations). > > Is this basically the same data? > > I've been working on an in memory representation of this data with the goal > of being able to serve as a knowledge resource for location understanding > in text as well as for the general task of looking up places near to some > position. > > Anyway - if anyone has clarification of the 'freeness' of this data, > I'd be interested > to hear about it. > > Matt Hurst > Senior Research Scientist > Intelliseek, Inc, > BlogPulse: www.blogpulse.com > > On 5/25/05, David Tattersall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > This looks like a very good find - a possible future idea could be getting > > bbc's forecasts and placing the appropriate weather symbols on a google > map > > (for those who can't quite get the new 3d maps!) > > > > If the bbc's RSS feed doesn't include lat/long (although the weather web > > site does so perhaps the database isn't needed) then this set of figures > > could come in useful. > > > > ps - new here :) I love the idea behind this. Keep up the good work. > > > > > > ________________________________ > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kosso > > Sent: 25 May 2005 4:09 > > To: [email protected] > > Subject: Re: [backstage] World Coordinates - Finally Available. > > > > > > i'll get this lot into a MySqldb later;) > > > > good find!! > > > > > > > > > > On 5/25/05, Therion Ware <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > Hi > > > > > > - Finally there. The database of all world cities can be found at: > > > > > > http://video.s-vid.com/~admin/geog/world.zip > > > > > > The file is in CSV format, of the form: > > > > > > iName cName CityName AdminDistrict LatLong > > > Africa / Middle East Tanzania Musasa Tanzania > > (General) > > > 003:21:00S031:33:00E > > > > > > About 24Mb. Unzips to about 193Mb. > > > > > > And includes the United States, which after much looking around, I > > > found - would that it were so easy to loose in real life...! > > > > > > There's 2,410,343 entries, and it's only population centres. There's > > > another 2 million or so sea mounts, geographical features and so on > > > omitted. If you really need these, let me know, and I'll see. > > > > > > I was thinking of setting up a MySQL backend that allows an HTTP > > > request where you specify a lat and long, and get back the nearest > > > place. If that'd be of use let me know here. > > > > > > As I originally said, I got the data free from the US geographical > > > survey back when they didn't charge for these things. What's amusing > > > is that Vietnam constitutes a unique region (Col 1). Presumably that > > > reflects the spirit of the them times to us today through inertia! > > > > > > Oh - another thing: projecting these coordinates on to a graphic map > > > is *not* a trivial thing for lots of different reasons. Spherical > > > coordinates in relation to your map image and all that... > > > > > > Anyway, have fun, and sniff, if you use them, think about crediting me > > > as in www.video2cd.co.uk as the source seeing as these days it'd cost > > > you money to get them! > > > > > > Best, > > > TW > > > > > > > > > -- > > > www.video2cd.co.uk <--- blatant self publicity > > > and unsubtle effort to flog stuff... > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday > snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com > >
