Hi,I am building a travel website with django. When a user is typing in the destination city name (or points of interest, like yellow stone), I want to do ajax auto suggestion. The question is how I could get the suggestion database? Is there any web service? Best if it could also support foreign cities. Thanks a lot.
+3
A:
What you want is called a gazetteer database.
The official USGS gazetteer for the USA is available for download.
Two global geocoded databases include:
Geonames has a free list of cities and POI. It includes the USGS gazetteer and lots of other info. You might have to subset their database however, as it might return too many results for you.
Maxmind also have a free database of cities.
fmark
2010-06-04 00:56:58
Thanks a lot for the answer, fmark. I checked out Maxmind and Geonames and their city information is what I am looking for. Only thing is that my website is more targeted to Chinese travellers, but all the state/region information in the database/ geoname search resultare are in English(or English alphabets). I just found if I type "shanghai" into google maps search, it could give me nice suggestion with the first one having city name, state name, country name in Chinese. That's exactly what I am looking for. Do you know whether that suggestion API is open/part of google map api? Thanks again.
Jason
2010-06-04 04:43:49
+1
A:
take a look at OpenStreetMap there are a lot of cities, pois both in chinease and english
LiFo
2010-07-11 12:49:11