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cgendreau / common-library-proposal

Common biodiversity data library proposal
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Is there an existing database with the coordinates of the cities of the world? #1

Open michaelakbaraly opened 12 years ago

michaelakbaraly commented 12 years ago

I would like to retrieve the coordinates of a city by giving its name. My idea was to use the yahoo geoservice but I am facing a requests number limitation that made this useless for a big amount of data

Thanks!

cgendreau commented 12 years ago

Your have 'Populated Places' at http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/. For smaller city, I don't know. But, with the state/province it's possible to find coordinates with uncertainty. It could also be difficult in certain country since the concept of city/province can be different.

lfrancke commented 12 years ago

You could use the OpenStreetMap dataset and set up your own Nominatim instance. I'm not aware of any public APIs without usage restrictions either.

michaelakbaraly commented 12 years ago

Thanks for these links, I will surely find something useful on it!