Online Database of locations in the world

[eSPiYa]

Hi, I'm looking for a free service that provides a database of all(better if it is complete) locations in the world with proper hierarchy from Countries to State and Province, down to Cities/Municipalities.

Thanks for any help.
Manually encoding them in my database is really a huge task.

[baja_yu]

Locations of what?

[eSPiYa]

Locations of what?

List of all countries, states, provinces, cities, and towns all over the world. ^_^

[baja_yu]

Don't take this the wrong way, but: good luck. It will be hard to do even for developed countries. As for the third world, I wouldn't even try. Countries, states and provinces sounds doable, but I can't even imagine the list of cities and towns.

[eSPiYa]

Don't take this the wrong way, but: good luck. It will be hard to do even for developed countries. As for the third world, I wouldn't even try. Countries, states and provinces sounds doable, but I can't even imagine the list of cities and towns.

I saw several web-sites with their own list of these locations. If I'm going to encode these locations one-by-one; it will take forever.

I'm trying to look at google map's API if this feature exists.

[baja_yu]

Can you list the places on those websites? Maybe a script could be written to scrape the data.

[eSPiYa]

This is the only one I remembered: http://www.olx.com/

[baja_yu]

Would this help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._United_States

(I love Wiki lists btw )

[eSPiYa]

Would this help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._United_States

(I love Wiki lists btw )

I love them too. I already got several lists through it but somehow these lists were incomplete and somewhat broken.
And I wish they'll expose some APIs to their database.

Still looking at Google Maps API.

[baja_yu]

Maybe this might help too http://answers.google.com/answers/th.../id/17619.html

[eSPiYa]

Maybe this might help too http://answers.google.com/answers/th.../id/17619.html

It seems their list focused only for US.
But my app will need to serve everyone in the world.
Anyway, thanks for the help.

[baja_yu]

At least it's a start. I doubt you will be able to find everything in one place. But who knows.

[akhileshbc]

I found these upon Googling:

• http://amrelgarhytech.blogspot.com/2...languages.html
• http://www.listofcountries.net/

[Nightwalker83]

I doubt you will find a free service where you can get all that information for free! However, I am aware of sites selling the information for a small price.

Edit:

I found World City DB! That seems to have what your are looking for, all free.

[baja_yu]

I found World City DB! That seems to have what your are looking for, all free.

Right of the bat, my country is missing from there I've also checked some of the others that I am very familiar with, and a lot of places are missing. And I'm not talking small villages and towns. There's places with population over 50K that aren't listed. So, the rest of it is probably not complete either.

[eSPiYa]

Thank you guys.
Sorry for late response, I'm having a problem with the IP banning here so I just use this TOR Network just to respond.

Anyway, I just downloaded a 100+MB list of cities with 3M+ records from http://geolite.maxmind.com/
And downloading a 191MB compressed file from http://www.geonames.org/export/.
Maybe this will help.

[Nightwalker83]

Right of the bat, my country is missing from there I've also checked some of the others that I am very familiar with, and a lot of places are missing. And I'm not talking small villages and towns. There's places with population over 50K that aren't listed. So, the rest of it is probably not complete either.

Looking further down the page I noticed that it is actually a paid service not a free one after all. So yeah, You would have to pay to get all the countries, etc. I noticed that some of the place names are spelt incorrectly too.

@eSPiYa,

I found that site but wasn't if it had what you wanted.

[eSPiYa]

Yes, it is not. That is why I'll create my own and will try to provide everyone this database for free(soon).
My VPS' bandwidth is un-metered but with have a limit of 50mbps. So will try to limit the requests/sec.

[gautamshaw]

Though i am not sure but you may try out some registration page of websites where they ask you to provide your country,state/province,city,locality,etc etc. you may get all the names and details from the view-source of the html of the website.

[akhileshbc]

Though i am not sure but you may try out some registration page of websites where they ask you to provide your country,state/province,city,locality,etc etc. you may get all the names and details from the view-source of the html of the website.

When the country is being selected from the combobox, it would generate the State list dynamically. And upon selecting the state, it would dynamically generate the City/Locations list(filled into another combobox).

That's how it works...

So, they have a server side scripting which will list all the states for the queried country name and the same goes for cities too..

[techgnome]

Personally, I don't think you should supply the user a drop down of cities. Let the user type it in. 1) As you're finding out, getting a complete list is next to impossible. 2) Inevitably, you'll run into a user whose town isn't listed. 3) Maintenance will be a nightmare.

I've never run into site where the city was a drop down... it's always been a textbox.

-tg

[akhileshbc]

The site that I have seen belongs to a government organization(the combobx for country is disabled with a selection as India). Another site that I have seen will do the dynamic loading for States, upon selecting the country.

[eSPiYa]

Thank you guys for the ideas.
I'll just make a list of continents and countries(to group them) then let them input their locations. After a certain interval; I just add 'em to the database.

I also using Wikipedia as my source just as suggested before.
Maybe I could open a portal for this soon so everyone could benefit for this.

Other ideas and help are also welcome. ^_^

[akhileshbc]

Thank you guys for the ideas.
I'll just make a list of continents and countries(to group them) then let them input their locations. After a certain interval; I just add 'em to the database.

I also using Wikipedia as my source just as suggested before.
Maybe I could open a portal for this soon so everyone could benefit for this.

Other ideas and help are also welcome. ^_^

You could make it as a webservice (free/paid)

[eSPiYa]

Yeah! I'll make it a public web service and it is free but will be in JSON form only due to limitation in bandwidth.
The numbers of request will be limited too(I hope I can limit it through C#/Mono).

Will think about premium(paid service) to support it. But for the moment only the free service.
Need to finish my main project before Dec. 25 though.

[Nightwalker83]

Personally, I don't think you should supply the user a drop down of cities. Let the user type it in. 1) As you're finding out, getting a complete list is next to impossible. 2) Inevitably, you'll run into a user whose town isn't listed. 3) Maintenance will be a nightmare.

I've never run into site where the city was a drop down... it's always been a textbox.

-tg

Yeah, new places seem to appear out of nowhere.

[baja_yu]

Don't don't appear often but they do change names. Countries do too. Take mine for example. In my 27 years I've lived in 4 different countries and I haven't moved an inch basically. Then, cities and countries are called differently in different countries/languages, which is something to take into account. Will this DB then be all in English or will every name be in the language spoken in the country. Then there are countries where more than one language is used. Then how do you treat the small towns and villages? There are so many in my country alone that aren't on the map. It's like a 25.000 piece puzzle. It can be done, but I sure as hell aint doing it

[techgnome]

It's not so much about new places appearing out of no where, but a matter of granularity... Most of the towns around here are big enough to possibly make the list... but at the same time, I know of plenty of towns out here whose population is in the tripple digits... and at least one whose population is a mere 95. And that's just within a 75 mile radius... it gets worse as you go further out.

-tg