Is there an open source international GeoCoding database if you only need city level resolution?

Question

I'm writing an application that needs to plot a user's location on the map, and the user could be anywhere in the world, but I only need city/town level resolution, not street address. Is there a single open source database that contains this information?

Very similar question with additional resources: Comprehensive list of Latitude and Longitude values of cities round the world — RyanKDalton, Apr 09 '12 at 17:36

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 08 '12 at 19:49

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Since you are interested in city/town level resolution, the best one is geonames.org.

"The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge."

In case you are interested in your user's IP address, you can use ipinfodb. It returns the location of an IP address (country, region, city, zipcode, latitude and longitude) and the associated timezone in JSON format.

answered Apr 08 '12 at 19:49

thelastray

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Another option for ips is https://ipinfo.io – Ben Dowling Oct 17 '17 at 18:33
geonames.org is only useful if you want the nearest city with a population over a given size. If you have a big city near a small city, you're not going to get the city boundary correct by just finding the nearest neighbor. – Luke Hutchison Feb 13 '24 at 08:46

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 19 '13 at 11:06

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For geocoding up to street level, but can also only request a city, this could be useful: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

answered Jan 19 '13 at 11:06

warrieka

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How so? Could you provide some example? – mjs Apr 17 '23 at 20:48

Is there an open source international GeoCoding database if you only need city level resolution?

2 Answers2