Be a diplomatic, be a Geonames Ambassador
GeoNames is an an open Geographical database. It integrates geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and others from various sources. Nowadays Wikipedia articles can be geotagged using geonames. The importance of Geonames has increased a lot in the last months, and it’s being recognized by several national mapping agencies.
To have an idea of Geonames size, It contains over 8 million geographical names corresponding to over 6.5 million unique features. A classical state service, as U.S. GEOnet Names Server, contains about 3.88 million named geographical features outside the USA. Geonames will be soon the most important source for geographical data.
Geonames has created recently the role of Geonames Ambassador, who is going to be a local contact to his country or region. They have to speak the local languages and must be familiar with the local geo data situation. For instance, Gipuzkoa Provincial Council has already integrated an official geographical dataset to geonames.I’m sure we will hear soon how more provincial agencies (Navarra, are you there?) will propose ambassadors to Geonames.
A complete list of ambassadors can be found in Geonames team page.
