WHAT IS IT?
GeoNames is a worldwide geographical database that indexes over 11 million placenames (cities, landmarks, points of interest) across every country. All data is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and a comprehensive REST API handles geocoding, reverse geocoding and proximity search — no need to run your own geo infrastructure.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING?
- Worldwide coverage: 11M+ placenames, 250+ countries, translated names in many languages, full administrative hierarchies (country → region → city → neighbourhood).
- Free data dumps:
allCountries.zip, postal codes, hierarchies and shapes are downloadable directly under CC BY 4.0, with daily updates. - Free REST API: web services for geocoding, reverse geocoding, nearby search, time zones, elevation and even geotagged Wikipedia articles — 10,000 credits per day per application.
- Flexible formats: JSON, XML or RDF responses, plus official client libraries for most mainstream languages.
- Dead simple integration: a free account gives you a username to pass as a query param — no complex API keys to juggle.
USE CASES
- Bulk geocoding and reverse geocoding without relying on Google Maps or Mapbox.
- Address form autocompletion with multilingual suggestions.
- Data enrichment: derive time zone, country, region or population from coordinates.
- Building maps or geo search engines by self-hosting the dumps in Postgres or Elasticsearch.
- Validating and normalising postal codes at an international scale.