Foreign language or alternative location names from Geonames.org

An experimentation in data parsinng and processing

In this repository, I go through some of the ways you can parse and process the location translation / altnames / alternative names / location name in a foreign language database from Geonames.org.

Please note that this database is in active development.

The alternames database contains geoname_id, language, and the name of the location in that language.

The Geonames.org dataset is quite large and a bit messy. So this repo contains:

• A notebook that demonstrates a data parsing process.
• A zip file contains the parsed and processed CSV and JSON files.

These files can be used in combination with IPinfo's IP to Location database. Use the geoname_id field to look up the values from the CSV and JSON files shared in this repo.

However, please note that Geonames.org does not provide a complete database, so be prepared for missing data. Alternatively, you can tweak the parameters of the notebook to generate your own version of parsed geoname altname/foreign language location names.

I highly recommend checking out the included Jupyter Notebook to understand the process of parsing this data.

Looking up the IP location using IPinfo IP to Location data downloads

mmdbctl read 137.93.255.181 location.mmdb

{
  "city": "Oslo",
  "country": "NO",
  "geoname_id": "3143244", <-----------------
  "lat": "59.9127",
  "lng": "10.7461",
  "postal_code": "0277",
  "region": "Oslo",
  "region_code": "03",
  "timezone": "Europe/Oslo"
}

Getting the altname using the included JSON file:

>>> geoname_alt_names[geoname_id] # 3143244

{'pt': 'Oslo', 'en': 'Oslo', 'ko': '오슬로', 'ru': 'Осло', 'ja': 'オスロ', 'ar': 'أوسلو', 'es': 'Oslo', 'zh': '奥斯陆', 'de': 'Oslo', 'fr': 'Oslo'}

Aside from the ISO language code, the dataset also contains the preferred (preferred or official name) and shortname (shortname for the location) values.

Notes / Subjective Decisions:

This is the beginning of a public database project. So, your opinion matters. Please open an issue to provide feedback.

• Note that for rows where the preferred ISO language is en, we have removed them as if the preferred ISO language is not present, the fallback value should default to English.
• Where multiple entries are made for the same language, we have chosen the first entry. There obviously a better solution for this.

The included notebook and databases can be used with a variety of IPinfo IP databases that include location information.

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This project utilizes data from Geonames.org, a geographical database covering all countries and containing over eleven million placenames. Geonames data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.