How to extract Geographic data from open street map or Google maps

Question

Hi,

i need to retrieve all the city names from a specific country using openstreet map or google maps. is there any API available?

or is there any other way of getting this world geographic data?

Cheers

Answer 1

Download the data from http://www.geonames.org/

Answer 2

I don't know if you're restricted to google maps or openstreet map but you might find taking a look at Yahoo's woeid interesting.

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/

I've had a play around with this and it's extremely powerful.