Hi David,
You might want to look at GeoNames - you can download the data and import it onto your own app pretty easily.
Han did this pretty quickly last summer.
If it not perfect for your needs you might find it useful since it contains useful language variations for locations.
http://www.geonames.org/export/
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/
- Pete
On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Shorthouse, David < davidpshorthouse@gmail.com> wrote:
Folks,
The Canadensys development team, http://www.canadensys.net is looking for efficient, low-maintenance ways to validate and reconcile data in its National cache of occurrence data. We are working on a Java library to initially tackle single-field Darwin Core validations, https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor. We hope this library is sufficiently generalized for uses outside our project.
Our current challenge is to reconcile country names, which requires access to an up-to-date, well-maintained knowledge base of country names, their alternative representations (possibly multilingual), and mappings to known misspellings. For performance reasons, we'd like this thesaurus to be embedded in the library, but with the capacity to be periodically refreshed with data pulled from external resources such as dbpedia.org. This clearly has ties to semantic web thinking and, because we're new to the tools and services in this space, we'd like to solicit pointers and feedback such that we build this part of our library with maximal benefit to other projects. We started collecting thoughts here: https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14.
Cheers,
David P. Shorthouse Christian Gendreau _______________________________________________ tdwg mailing list tdwg@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg