LinuxWorld interviews Geonames founder
LinuxWorld recently features an interview with Marc Wick, the founder of Geonames. In the interview, Marc revealed many interesting facts about Geonames.
GeoNames is a free and open source geographical database. Primarily for developers wanting to integrate the project into web services and applications, it integrates world-wide geographical data including names of places in various languages, elevation, population, and all latitude / longitude coordinates. Users are able to manually edit, correct and add new names with a user-friendly wiki interface. The data is accessible through a number of webservices and a daily database export.
Interesting facts about Geonames:
- Geonames data initially came from NGA, USGS and the worldgazetter. Today the number of sources has grown to around 100.
- Geonames API initially supports a single search service. Today its API has grown to around 30 different services.
- Prominent web sites use Geonames, including LinkedIn, BBC and Nike. Popular mashup tools like Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo! Pipes feature predefined Geonames modules for building customized mashups.
- The largest Geonames user base is in Spain.
- Geonames runs on PostgreSQL and Tomcat. Its search implementation is built on Apache Lucene.
- Geonames has a “marketing team” of 30 people — Geonames ambassadors, who help with questions regarding their countries and serve as local contact person for national data providers.
- Geonames’ core development team consists of 4-5 hard working engineers.
- The biggest technical challenge is getting data — the team has more liberal access to US Army data than to Europe or Australian “public” data.
Geonames is a great service in a niche market. It’s open source model will help the project to continue to grow and expand its user base. The structured data support in Geonames , publishing data in RDF/OWL, JSON and XML, can foster the next generation of web services for knowledge sharing. Without Geonames, the development of many geospatial web applications (e.g., gnizr, HeyWhatsThat and ongmap) would be extremely difficult if not impossible.
Spotted on: http://tinyurl.com/ysgbj2
GeoNames provides great services, I have myself used their GeoRSS tagger, their “Nearest Place” and a number of others in some of my own experiments…
But as with many things of this sort - I have to wonder about longterm viability and sustainability, and if this is a business model that will work in the longterm. While it’s commendable that folks have stepped up to the plate with sponsorship and contributions, will that continue or will other models need to be developed?
Comment by Dave Smith — December 10, 2007 @ 2:03 pm