The OpenGov OpenData Portal - GIS Data Tips and Open Resources: place names

Showing posts with label place names. Show all posts

Thursday, September 21, 2006

NZ Geographical Place Names & Street Names

Names for streets, roads and highways are assigned by the local City or District Council, in accordance with the Local Government Act. Railway names are approved by the NZ Geographic Board, and State Highway numbers are allocated by Transit New Zealand. Downloadable database here - http://www.linz.govt.nz/core/placenames/index.html

GEOnet Names Server (GNS)

The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) provides access to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names' (US BGN) database of foreign geographic feature names. The GNS contains 4.0 million features with 5.5 million names - see http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html

GeoDataSource Place names

Another POI database is on the market in the GeoDataSource Cities Database product. The company has several flavors that run as much as $1,000+. A free product is available to those who register. It contains 2 million+ city place names. Not sure how this product differs from some of the widely available free place name products available. See more at http://www.geodatasource.com/cities-free.html - other free place name products can be found here & here for those interested - there's also the ever popular GNS names server at http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Global Population Database (GPOPDB)

The Global Population Database (GPOPDB) is used to map the populations of many countries around the world. The database uses a rectangular grid for mapping of 20 minutes of latitude by 30 minutes of longitude (about 2,000 square kilometers at the equator). For urban areas of more than 25,000 people, density circles are drawn to provide more detail. Population data is primarily obtained through censuses, surveys and maps from the Bureau of the Census Library or from the countries themselves. Detailed data are obtained by working from the national totals towards the first-order administrative levels; typically state, province or region. See
http://www.ciesin.org/datasets/cir/gpopdb-home.html &
ftp://ftp.ciesin.org/pub/data/Global_Pop_DB

Canadian Geographical Names

Query this extensive database by name, geography, or postal code. Digital data products are available for purchase. See http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/

NGA GEOnet Names Server (GNS

The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) provides access to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names' (US BGN) database of foreign geographic feature names. The database is the official repository of foreign place-name decisions approved by the US BGN. Approximately 20,000 of the database's features are updated monthly. http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/

Geonames - place names and post codes

The Geonames web resource has been totally revamped and now sports a very simple user interface for searching place names.A nice feature is the ability to dump all the data into a simple txt file for use within any GIS. See http://www.geonames.org/ or jump directly to http://www.geonames.org/export/ to export these data.