Using Geonames for country/state/city?

[weder]

Hi,

wouldn't it be nice to be able to use the Geonames database (or their web service) when entering a location? I'm thinking only about using their data when entering country, state (maps to admin1) and city (a populated place) when adding a new JEV location. The actual venue including its address would still be stored in the location module.

Has anyone done something similar? The one thing I'm trying to avoid is having to maintain the hierarchical state->city/village/place structure for every country myself, when refraining from using the free input of addresses. This in order to improve the data quality of my locations.

So, does anything like this exist already, i.e. has anyone created an adapter to Geonames or may another, similar service?

Unfortunately, it is kind of clumsy to sync a local mirror db of Geonames. There's no binary or SQL dump, all they offer are CSV files and deltas for changes entered during the last day. The data structure itself also seems to change every now and than, so I guess using the web service would actually be best to avoid too many dependancies.

Thanks
Andreas

[Geraint]

I'd not come across that database/service before.

Integration with managed locations would be good. We may be able to create a JSON integration where you type a partial address and you get a list of matching possibilities in a popup which you select to get a correctly formatted address?

Unfortunately I won't be able to do much about this before the end of October.