Datasource with global cities/towns/villages with Englisch names and coordinates

Question

In almost ever GIS project there is the need to map nearby cities and towns, often also small villages in rural areas.

Open Street Map (OSM) offers a lot of spatially explicit data including "places" containing the names of urban areas mapped in OSM. Unfortunately, not all places also have English names and a popular download site (Geofabrik) does not support the download of English Names.

I would like to know if there is another free alternative that can be used and shows a high level of detail also regarding smaller settlements and which has coordinates or already comes in a GIS format (such as Shapefiles or geodatabase).

Answer 1

One option would be the GEOnet Names Server published by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It is a gazetteer of global place names that includes a variety of spellings in different languages, including the common English variants, plus longitude and latitude coordinates. It includes administrative divisions, cities and towns, concentrated settlements, and even physical / non-populated features. It's quite detailed. The interface can be a little tough to use, but you also have the option of simply downloading all place names for a particular country in a CSV file.

For some reason I'm not able to access it today without getting some warning about a security certificate being expired. Normally you can access it here: http://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html

One quirk is that it does not include the United States or any US territories. A comparable source for these areas would be the Geographic Names Information Server published by the USGS: http://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=gnispq

I wrote a post a while back that summarizes the differences between GEOnet and Geonames gazetteers if you want to see that for more details (Geonames is a crowdsourced alternative, also includes name variants, English spellings, and coordinates).

For shapefiles for global mapping I often refer people to Natural Earth. Its cultural vector layers collection includes features for populated places, cities and towns, as well as boundaries for countries, internal subdivisions, and physical features.