Multimap :: Blog

When you enter an address on multimap.com, we use a variety of sources of data, known as gazetteers, to try to locate what you are looking for.

“Commercial” gazetteers, such as those provided by our friends at Tele Atlas and Harper Collins, are great at providing “official” data, such as street names, postal codes and administrative areas. “Downing Street“, “90210” and “1er Arrondissement” are good examples of “official” data. The data is sourced, verified and released sometimes up to 4 times per year.

Many people search for common places of interest, such as “Big Ben“. There are also many searches for places that are not “official” administrative areas. “Bloomsbury“, “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Back Bay” are great examples of these. For all their strengths, commercial gazetteers sometimes don’t cater well for these types of searches.

Why are we telling you this? Well, we have now integrated GeoNames as an additional data source for address look-ups. You can see it in action not only on multimap.com, but also in the Multimap Open API.

GeoNames is a global geographical database that contains over 6.5 million places, with 2 million alternative names in up to 200 languages, that is continuously updated by users around the world, through a friendly wiki interface. Any changes are integrated into our databases within 24 hours.

GeoNames contains geographic places such as mountains, seas, lakes, valleys, coasts, and places of interest. In addition, it also contains alternative names so you can find a place like ‘London’ in many different languages (Londres, Londra, Londýn, Londain, Londinium).

By combining commercial gazetteers with community sources, such as GeoNames, we hope we can offer you the best of both worlds. Let us know what you think over in the forums and visit the Geonames site to add new places, change a wrong location or add alternative names, even if it means just adding a few entries to somewhere that you know well.