[wp-hackers] Re: Place, Geotagging

[Otto]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course that doesn't provide an exact match to a City/Place which would be
> very useful. Problem is, I guess, that there is no standard list of places.

There's several good ones, actually.

The biggest is probably the Getty Thesaurus:
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/index.html

Note that every entry is numbered, organized into hierarchy, etc. It's
fairly freakin' huge, actually. For example, Memphis, TN is number
7017750:
http://www.getty.edu/vow/TGNFullDisplay?find=&place=&nation=&english=Y&subjectid=7017750

Or, if you want the kind of mindless level of detail that government
peons are good at, then the USGS maintains a list of every "official"
geographic name everywhere: http://geonames.usgs.gov/
Their US data is available for download at a hefty 67 meg or so:
http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm
Their non-US data is accessible through the Geonet names server,
although I don't grasp the API for it entirely:
http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html

-Otto