[OKFN-CH] WG: help needed

Mon Sep 22 15:09:23 UTC 2014

On 2014-09-22 16:03, Riedl Reinhard wrote:
> *Von:*okfn-ch [mailto:okfn-ch-bounces at lists.okfn.org] *Im Auftrag von
> *Muriel Staub
> *Gesendet:* Montag, 22. September 2014 15:54
> *An:* okfn-ch at lists.okfn.org
> *Betreff:* [OKFN-CH] help needed
>
> Hi there,
>
> I would appreciate it if somebody of you could help me with the
> following subject:
>
> We were contacted by public authorities who are looking for official and
> open data containing all countries, cities, provinces etc. of the entire
> world.
>
> As far as I was told, the Swiss Federal Office for Statistics only has
> the data for Europe and CH.
>
> Thanks for letting me know if you have an idea where this data is openly
> available.

I presume when you are interested in metadata e.g., codes, labels about 
those areas types, as opposed to observations or studies including those 
areas. Can you specify whether you are after economic, geopolitical or 
geographic divisions?

AFAIK, there is no agency that has a standardized collection of the 
divisions that you are after. You'll have to hunt down each statistical 
agency per country if you want to get the complete "official" list of 
provinces and cities. See how far the following will get you:

* http://geonames.org/ (unofficial)

* http://openstreetmap.org/ with http://linkedgeodata.org/  (unofficial)

* http://linkedgeodata.org/GADM  (RDF conversion of GADM). See also: 
http://gadm.geovocab.org/

* 
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/nuts_nomenclature/introduction 
(EU only) -- There is an RDF serialization of this at 
http://eurostat.linked-statistics.org/dic/geo

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_administrative_subdivision_codes

* Number of cities that you can probably dig out of DBpedia/Wikidata: 
http://dbpedia.org/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org&query=Select+Count%28*%29+{+%3Fs+a+dbpedia-owl%3ACity+}&format=text%2Fhtml&timeout=30000&debug=on 
  ;) See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_cities_by_country

You may need to mix and match in the end :S

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i

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