Geolocation plays a crucial role in determining the online experience for users. However, this system is not without its challenges, as exemplified by the case of Northern Cyprus. This region, while legally recognized as part of Cyprus, faces a unique dilemma when it comes to online identification.

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.

I was recently asked whether we could harmonize the usage of St. and Saint. We do use both and have places with the main toponym name starting with St. and others starting with Saint.
Examples are St. Louis and Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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.

At the beginning of this year the addresses for France have become finally available as open data under the French IO license compatible with CC-BY.
The data has been downloadable for a couple of years at no cost, but unfortunately under a restricted share-alike license. It is very good news that the understanding that share-alike is quite the contrary of open has won ground and made the French government change the license strategy.

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.

To improve coverage and handling for historic names the GeoNames alternatenames table has two new fields ‘from‘ and ‘to‘. The two fields allow adding a string describing the period when the name was used. The main use case is for historic names but current names may also have the ‘from‘ field filled to indicate since when the current name is in use.

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.

ISO has published the country codes for South Sudan. As expected in our blog posting it is SS. The letter codes for Sudan remain the same, whereas the numeric code for Sudan was changed from 736 to 729.

* US BGN=Formerly FIPS PUB 10-4

South Sudan became an independent state on 9 July 2011.
The new country has received geonameid 7909807. ISO has not yet assigned a country code and we temporarily use the country code XS. It will be changed to the official code as soon as ISO assigns a code to the new country. The ISO code is expected to be SS.  The Republic of South Sudan is not the only country in the GeoNames database with a temporary country code. The other temporary country code XK stands for Kosovo.
The features of South Sudan have been updated with the temporary country
code.
Sudan had 25 ADM1 before the independence of the south. 15 ADM1 remain
with Sudan, 10 states are now the ADM1 of South Sudan which formerly composed the provinces of Equatoria (Central Equatoria, Eastern Equatoria, and Western Equatoria); Bahr el Ghazal (Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Western Bahr el Ghazal, Lakes, and Warrap); and Upper Nile (Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile).

Improving the way GeoNames handles historical names is a popular feature request. GeoNames is now beginning to address this question.

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.

Over the last couple of weeks a new data extract for the wikipedia web services was implemented and deployed. The major change is certainly the dramatically increased number of geo located wikipedia articles.

A new attribute ‘rank‘ has been added to the xml and json responses. It gives an indication of the popularity or relevancy of an article. The rank is an integer number from ‘1‘ for the least popular articles to ‘100‘ for the most popular articles. It is calculated from the number of links pointing to an article and the article length. The articles are more or less evenly distributed over the 100 ranks.

The ‘elevation‘ field is now filled for nearly all articles, where no elevation could be parsed from the article itself it was enhanced with a reverse geocoded value from srtm3 or aster. The ‘countryCode‘ coverage has also been improved. The attributes ‘population‘ and ‘elevation‘ are no longer set to ‘0’ for unknown values, they are left empty instead.