New Google Blog

[Mar 7, 2006] Many people that develop Web applications using information from Google Maps API miss the possibility of getting geographic information according to certain data, like post codes or city/town names.

One of the most interesting services facilitating this kind of information is GeoNames. It is a personal project of Marc Wick (from Switzerland) that has fed itself on part of the global geographic data freely available in 'GEOnet Names Server (USA Administration). He has created one of the best tools that we have found wich uses 'Google Maps' and Ajax.

He has used a few more data to develop several free Web services that allow us to access to specific information, like post codes close to certain geographic coordinates (example), cities and geographical features depending on a name (example), or information about a post code (example).

Marc Wick claims that he'll try to keep 'GeoNames' Web services free for a long time, but he admits that if they gain many users, servers will face the consequences and the moment of asking for help (especially, economic help) to maintain them may come at some point.

Tagzania is one of the services, that is testing GeoNames, to be able to use it and add new data to its own tool. Tagzania is offering now its interface in several new languages like Spanish, Basque or Polish.

By the way, during the last few days, new projects that make use of 'Google Maps' data have been launched. One of them is this one: it shows the Earth's surface at night and allows us to distinguish big cities by their amount of light pollution.