What is new

The toponym name. The XML and JSON output of the webservices has always had two names for a feature: toponymName, the name stored in the GeoNames database, and name, the name in the requested language. The RDF documents had only gn:name, the name in the language. The new property gn:toponymName closes that gap. It carries the name as recorded in the database, without a language tag. For counties the difference is easy to see:

The property is in every document: the feature itself, the children, the neighbours and the nearby features.

A fifth level of parents. Features in countries with a fifth level of administrative divisions now link to that parent with gn:parentADM5, next to gn:parentADM1 to gn:parentADM4.

Feature codes up to date. The ontology now has the 19 feature codes of the current list that it lacked, among them the historical fifth-order division (A.ADM5H), apartment building (S.BLDA) and grove (V.GROVE). The 25 codes that are neither in the list nor in use are marked as deprecated, not removed, so that old data still resolves. The English texts of 8 codes follow the current list, and the Swedish, Norwegian and Russian labels were brought in line with the feature code files in the download.

One licence. The ontology is now licensed under CC BY 4.0, like the data. The Creative Commons prefix in the file also points to the official namespace, and the import of a vocabulary that is no longer online was removed, which makes the ontology load faster in tools that follow imports.

If you already use the RDF

Nothing breaks. The namespace of the properties is unchanged, no property or code was removed or renamed, and gn:name carries the same value as before. The earlier versions of the ontology stay online.

• Queries that read gn:name keep working. If you want the stored name, read gn:toponymName.
• Deprecated codes are still in the file, with owl:deprecated and, for two of them, a pointer to the code that replaces them. A tool that lists all codes sees 25 more entries marked as deprecated.
• The licence statement of the ontology changed from CC BY 3.0 to CC BY 4.0 from this version on; the older versions keep the licence they were published with.
• An alignment with GeoSPARQL is a possible next step. It would be a version of its own, since it changes the RDF of every feature.

Links

• ontology_v3.4.rdf
• Documentation and version history
• An example document: Fairfax County

Northern Cyprus, situated on the island of Cyprus, is officially recognized as part of the Republic of Cyprus. However, the de facto situation is markedly different, with Turkey exerting influence and control over the region. This dual status has significant implications for the internet experience of those residing in Northern Cyprus.

At Geonames, we acknowledge the complexities surrounding Northern Cyprus and its online identification. In response to user concerns and to better reflect the on-the-ground reality, we have updated our database. The feature now carries the country code TR (Turkey) with a secondary code CY (Cyprus), accompanied by carefully defined boundaries.

One of the major challenges faced by individuals in Northern Cyprus is the misidentification of their location by IP locators. Despite the de facto situation aligning them more closely with Turkey, many geolocation services identify them solely as being in Cyprus. This discrepancy can impact various aspects of their online experience, from accessing region-specific content to encountering challenges with online services that depend on accurate location data. As most IP location service are based on Geonames data the recent update will help improve the result.

As it turns out wikipedia makes this same distinction and uses St for St. Louis and Saint for Saint Paul.

When checking google trends to see what is used in searches we also encounter the same pattern. While St is used more often when searching for St. Louis, Saint is used more likely when searching for Saint Paul.

Considering the usage of both St. and Saint I think we should not harmonize, but rather use what is commonly used for the particular place. We should respect different usage for different places and not try to force a harmonized standard on it. Be it St. or Saint.

Néanmoins, je considère que la constitution d’une base adresse nationale gratuite et unifiée est un enjeu important pour l’économie française ainsi que pour la chaîne de décision publique (gestion de crise, gestion des équipements, etc.) et doit constituer une priorité pour la transformation de l’Etat. [réponse du Premier Ministre, 4 Mars 2019]

The new address data is available in the geonames api for the address services:
geoCodeAddress it retrieves the lat/lng for a given street:
http://api.geonames.org/geoCodeAddress?q=67+Avenue+Simon+Bolivar&username=demo

The reverse geocoding service address returns the next address for a given lat/lng:
http://api.geonames.org/address?lat=48.87636&lng=2.37728&username=demo

The streetNameLookup allows for user friendly input forms.
You can make a request to the server to get all streets beginning with the letters typed by the user:
http://api.geonames.org/streetNameLookupJSON?q=Avenue%20Simon&username=demo&formatted=true&country=FR

With this new addition the number of countries supported by the address services has increased to 28.

So far the fields only contain years. The data type string, however, allows to express other information as well. Like ’14uu’ to express the fourteenth century or ‘197u’ to describe the seventies. We don’t want to invent our own standard to describe uncertainty and will use the ISO 8601 standard once it will be published. The ISO 8601 will supersede the library of congress Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF ) draft.

Some examples:

Jakarta has the following alternatenames with the fields filled:

• Sunda Kelapa 397-1527
• Jayakarta 1527-1619
• Batavia 1619-1949
• Djakarta 1949-1972
• Jakarta 1972-

The German city Chemnitz was called Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 till 1990. Mumbai was called Bombay in English till 1995.

To export the two new fields a new file alternatenamesV2 is now available in the download directory. The file is the same as the now obsolete file alternatenames, with two additional columns. The two files will exists for some time in parallel to allow users to change their import scripts.

Link: http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/

After many years without major changes to the GeoNames Map Interface it was time for an update. The new Map Interface makes full use of the screen for the map view. Other information is displayed on top of the map. The GeoNames gazetteer layer can now be displayed together with the wikipedia mashup. Boundingboxes and polygon boundaries are displayed where available and when associated with a GeoName feature. The bounding box is derived from the polygon information or from bounding boxes of children features. For populated places without polygon information the bounding box is derived from population number and feature code.

Thanks to Christophe for the implementation.

GeoNames is switching from the original SRTM data provided by NASA to the processed srtm v4.1 data provided by cgiar. The extract files now contain srtm data where available and gtopo30 elsewhere.

SRTM is digital elevation model from 56° S to 60° N in a three arcsecond (90 m) resolution. The original data provided by NASA contains small holes of no data over water bodies, mountainous regions and desertic regions. Andy Jarvis and Edward Guevara of the CIAT Agroecosystems Resilience project (CGIAR), Hannes Isaak Reuter (JRC-IES-LMNH) and Andy Nelson (JRC-IES-GEM) have further processed the original DEMs to fill in these no-data voids. This involved the production of vector contours and points, and the re-interpolation of these derived contours back into a raster DEM.  The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for sustainable development to reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience.

GeoNames has been kindly granted permission to use the processed srtm data. In exchange CGIAR has been given complimentary access to the premium web services. Thanks to Andy Jarvis and all the others involved.

* US BGN=Formerly FIPS PUB 10-4

There are two new flags in the alternate name edit tool:
isHistoric for names of the past that are no longer used.
isColloquial for slang and colloquial names

At the recent Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers is was discussed how GeoNames could be extended to improve support for the timeline. Some attributes under consideration:
– fromPeriod (date, year, decade, century or period of usage)
– toPeriod
– source (book or map where the name is used), publication date of the source
– notes

The discussion for these fields is still ongoing and any feedback is welcome.
The two new flags isColloquial and isHistoric are not yet included in the daily extract as we will probably add some more attributes and don’t want to change the extract files too often. Each change in the extact files breaks the import scripts of users. We will extract the records with the two new flags in separate files as a temporary workaround till everything is stable.