GeoNames geographical database
Avishkar Autar · Aug 30 2014 · Random
I came across the GeoNames database recently and was impressed with the breadth of locations available. I downloaded the allCountries.zip from http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ which gives data (name, location, population, etc.) on places across all countries in one, TSV delimited, text file. To work with the data more easily, I wrote a PHP script to put the entries into a MySQL database table (it’s actually just a simple modification to the script I used for the Wiktionary definitions import). The TSV, MySQL database, and PHP script are all presented below.
GeoNames MySQL database export
<?php
require "Database.php";
$tsvInputFilePath = "allCountries.txt";
echo "Importing {$tsvInputFilePath} ...\n";
// Open file
$fp = fopen($tsvInputFilePath, "r");
if($fp === FALSE) {
echo "Could not find file path: " . $tsvInputFilePath;
exit;
}
// Establish DB connection
$db = new Database();
while (!feof($fp)) {
// Get line and parse tab-delimited fields
$ln = fgets($fp);
$parts = explode("\t", $ln);
if(count($parts) < 19) {
continue;
}
// Insert into database
$db->query("INSERT INTO cities (`id`,
`name`,
`asciiname`,
`alternatenames`,
`latitude`,
`longitude`,
`feature_class`,
`feature_code`,
`country_code`,
`cc2`,
`admin1_code`,
`admin2_code`,
`admin3_code`,
`admin4_code`,
`population`,
`elevation`,
`dem`,
`timezone`,
`last_modified_at`)
VALUES (?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)",
$parts[0],
$parts[1],
$parts[2],
$parts[3],
$parts[4],
$parts[5],
$parts[6],
$parts[7],
$parts[8],
$parts[9],
$parts[10],
$parts[11],
$parts[12],
$parts[13],
$parts[14],
$parts[15],
$parts[16],
$parts[17],
$parts[18]
);
}
echo "done.\n";
exit;
The Database class is wrapper for mysqli, you can find it, along with the script above, in the geonames-allcountries-import bitbucket repo.
Note that this script will take a while to run (likely a few days) as there are 9,195,153 records that need to be inserted and we’re just doing simple INSERTs with no optimizations.
An overview of each of the fields in the database can be found in the GeoNames export readme.txt. Particularly important is the feature_class and feature_code fields, the range of values for which can be found on the GeoNames Feature Codes page. Also, as indicated in the readme, the data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.