[wp-hackers] Re: Place, Geotagging

[Otto]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Otto wrote:
>>> There's several good ones, actually.
> The biggest is probably the Getty Thesaurus:
> http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/index.htm
> l
>
> Another interesting source.  However there is one deal killer: Use beyond
> limited research and cataloging efforts requires licensing.

Yeah, that's one thing I don't like about Getty.

I've been looking around, and the US Populated Places data available
here: http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm (select the
dropdown for populated places) is only around 7 meg compressed, and
the format is very straightforward, as pipe delimited text.

For non-US locations, you could have the user download the data for
their individual country from here:
http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm . The format is not
quite as pleasant, it's a fixed width format with 2 lines per entry.
Easily parsed, just annoying to do so.

Of course, this is all plugin territory, I believe. No reason to have
this sort of thing in the core.

Now, for the core WordPress code, if somebody wants to integrate it,
then why mess about? Google offers all this useful stuff via AJAX for
free. And that includes reverse Geocoding:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#ReverseGeocoding

-Otto