GEOnet Names Server

The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) is a database for locations outside the United States and Antarctica. It is the official repository of foreign place-name decisions approved by the US U.S. Board on Geographic Names. There are no licensing requirements or restrictions in place for the use of the GNS data, so it is suitable for OSM use.

Each entry is one line in a text file showing, amongst other things, the latitude/longitude position, name in both in Unicode UTF-8 and reduced to the closest purely English equivalent, and a classification of the type of feature (Feature Classification Code) such as rivers, mountains, populated places.

Individual country files or one big (roughly 220MB) file can be downloaded here:

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm

or viewed at:

http://geonames.nga.mil/ggmaviewer/default.asp

The data is updated every month, though some countries much more frequently than others.

A number of people have written scripts to convert the information to OSM. See User:Ewmjc/GNS 2 OSM Conversion Script for a Perl version written by MikeCollinson.

Caveats

While the data is very useful you should note the following.

Once a name is put into the database, it is never removed unless it is an obvious duplicate. This means that there are many, many names that have no modern significance.

The geographical resolution is often very coarse, from experience features can often be two to three kilometres from there actual locations.

Places where people live are are generally just classifies as "PPL", Populated Place. This can be anything from a city to what is now just a farm house.

There is a small but significant amount of entries that are inaccurate or plain wrong: mistranscriptions, places that are listed as in one country but actually somewhere else completely.

Tags

Tags - example

• GNS:id = -2011484
• GNS:dsg_code = PPL
• GNS:dsg_string = populated place
• is_in:country = Nigeria
• name = Ikara
• place = village
• source = GNS

Links

• GNS namefiles - Download location
  • Description of Names Files for Countries and Territories Format - Specifies what the fields in the GNS files mean
• Feature Classification and Feature Designation Code references:
  • GNS Feature Designation Cross Reference
  • Reference in CSV
• For visualisation as a WMS layer, in JOSM for example for the "Approved_P" GNS layer items (copy the following link in "Personalised WMS link") :
  • http://geonames.nga.mil/names/request.asp?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.0&REQUEST=GetMap&format=image/jpeg&LAYERS=%28N%29%20Approved_P&