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I need a free Geo-location database for a commercial project. It must be of high quality and updated regularly. Has anyone ever come across a database like this?

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    Be more specific. What country(s) are you looking for? What points of interest (POI) do you need? What information on the POI are you looking for?
    – Andrew - OpenGeoCode
    Commented Feb 23, 2014 at 22:00
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    This question is little vague, please be more specific as to what sort of data you need.
    – teeparty
    Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 18:37

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check out geonames, that's the only thing that comes to mind
http://www.geonames.org/

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Highly recommend GeoNames.

It's a huge dataset, which I worked with a few years back.

We were using it for city/town data, and you could choose the databases for cities greater than say, 1 million, or greater than 100,000 or all.

They geolocate the towns, parks, lakes, hills, checkpoints, just about any landmark you could think of. You have to indicate that you're using them, but otherwise, pretty darn great. And the dat was relatively easy to use, once we imported it into a mysql database, for which there are instructions/tutorials onsite.

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  • Thanks to @albert for first suggesting Geonames and to Mark Mayo for the clarification and explanation.
    – Jeanne Holm
    Commented Mar 7, 2014 at 16:54
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There is simplegeo (public database) but the quality is not hight.

You can use Factual and it's free

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  • I was not able to find simplegeo website. Are their still active? Crunchbase indicate they have been acquired by Urban Airship. (10/31/11). Can you provide more details on information available through Factual?
    – magdmartin
    Commented Feb 27, 2014 at 3:48
  • Simplegeo has been acquired by Factual
    – Julien
    Commented Feb 27, 2014 at 11:03
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I have in mind a very good solution, but it is a commercial one. https://www.maxmind.com/ This is the database that is currently being used by the open source analytic projects Piwik, so I highly recommend it.

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If you need the lingual translations of the geographic entities (especially countries) in many languages, the author of GeoNames recommended me to use Lexvo because in terms of translations it is more complete and better maintained.

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  • this doesn't actually answer the question about geolocation. Translations of names are useful, and this seems like a useful resource, but I don't see how you can get geolocation information out of it. Am I missing something?
    – Joe
    Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 3:21

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