List of Cities by Country

Question

Where does Facebook get their list of cities from? Is there a service that provides an up-to-date feed of cities based on country?

Answer 1

Its possible that they reuse the data that people have already put in for cities. Another possibility is a third party data source. MaxMind provides a database of the sorts

Answer 2

I don't know about any special database, but a number of city lists for certain area can be found. Wikipedia would also be a nice source. The dbpedia project aims to structure wikipedia content, so you can search explicitly for 'cities':

http://dbpedia.neofonie.de/browse/rdf-type:Place/rdf-type:City/

Edit: dbpedia does not seem lo like escaped urls, so the above url only works when copy-pasted into the url-bar ..

Answer 3

There are all sorts of address database services, most of which are quite expensive. No idea if that's what Facebook uses, but you'll find them used in many companies that do any type of shipping.