[OSM-talk] Geographic names and lat/long pairs

[Evan Prodromou]

So, the eerily-named National Geographic Intelligence Agency (NGIS) of
the United States has a huge database of geographic names and lat/long
pairs, updated monthly, available for download online:

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html

Being the product of a US government agency, the data is in the public
domain and free for any use.

It doesn't cover the United States -- for bureaucratic reasons, that
stuff is covered by another agency. US data can be downloaded here:

http://geonames.usgs.gov/stategaz/index.html

Of course, the files are in different format. I guess we should all be
grateful that you don't have to buy reel-to-reel tapes by mail order.

Now, that all said: this seems like valuable information that could be
useful for OpenStreetMaps. Is there a way that this could/should be
uploaded to the OSM server? Kept up-to-date on a monthly basis, without
overwriting local modifications?  There are several million data points,
and a non-trivial number of them are synonyms. How would that work?

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
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