23
My open data project (I am a co-founder) has a free list of all the cities in the world, along with their area centroid (lat/lng), as a CSV file. It is compiled from the USGS/GNIS (US) and NGA/GNS (non-US) databases.
http://www.opengeocode.org/download.php#cities
As an alternate source, the United Nations Statistical Division publishes an annual yearbook ...
19
Using the Census Bureau's API, you can retrieve quite a bit of information about counties, but you need to learn where it's stored. You can request up to 50 different variables in a single call, and you can ask for all counties in the US with one call.
To the census, "cities" are "places," and that includes things that you and I might think of as a city but ...
15
You have been misled, CBSA files are in fact what you are looking for. Check the documentation detailing what each type of shapefile contains.
Want more verification? Here is the description of the GEOID field for the CBSA shapefile: 2010 Census metropolitan statistical area/micropolitan statistical area code found in CBSAFP10. And here is the description ...
11
The U.S. Small Business Administration has an API that provides U.S. City and County Data.
This geographic names data set provides a "mashup" of URLs for official city and county government web sites and city and county location data from the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). GNIS data includes incorporated places, census designated areas, ...
11
(Disclaimer: I work for the U.S. Treasury but am writing in my personal capacity.)
I do not know of an API that has what you are looking for off the shelf, but I would recommend you look into what information you can already access or request from the official system governing registration in the .gov domain. The .gov domain registration process for cities ...
11
Consider geonames, which probably has the largest collection of place names anywhere (excluding street names, which is the purview of openstreetmap.org):
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/
From the directory above, you can download a list of "large" cities (or every single placename geonames knows about), and "readme.txt" in that directory explains ...
9
Wikidata has a category called "city" which will give you a list of world cities
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q515
You can use SPARQL to query Wikidata
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service/User_Manual
https://query.wikidata.org/
A sample SPARQL query will give you the city name in the target language
SELECT ?city ?cityLabel ?country ?...
8
If you don't need programmatic access (i.e. an API), you can use the Google Advanced Image Search.
You can also get there by following these simple steps:
Go to search.creativecommons.org
Enter your search term (e.g. berlin)
Select your license requirements (use for commercial purposes and/or modify, adapt, or build upon)
Click on Google Images
On Google ...
8
I found an API from Numbeo (documentation) that claims
1,485,832 prices in 4,786 cities entered by 177,368 users
(information updated 2014-11-25)
Here is their page related to the Cost of Living.
And an overview of the data for Zurich.
Their Terms of Service state that the license is CC BY-SA 3.0 and GNU Free Document License (GFDL).
What I can't ...
8
The US Census Bureau also has a national gazeteer file with state and city info, including incorporation information.
For metadata/excel file column please have a look at HERE.
7
I've been building an API for this called DemocracyMap. Probably the most relevant data resource for the basic details of city and county government is the Census of Governments: Government Integrated Directory which provides city/county name, address of gov office, phone number, etc. This in combination with Census Tiger boundary data will get you pretty ...
7
This is a goal of the DemocracyMap project, which is still nascent.
The DemocracyMap API aims to provide normalized structured data for
all of the contact details and other primary information for every
government body and government official that represents you. Currently
this API is more of a meta-API that aggregates, normalizes, and caches
...
7
GreenButtonData.org (open source) is compiling this type of information from its users. They currently claim that upto 60 million households can access their monitoring/analysis system via partnerships with utility companies.
They have a REST API, but I do not know how much aggregated data is available yet. They have though given some datasets (or samples),...
7
I guess the Geonames project is the closest answer to your question. You can download the data directly on the website or you can also find it here and download it/use the api.
Cheers
7
I think that geonames.org has the data you require.
It's datasets contain:
The main 'geoname' table has the following fields :
---------------------------------------------------
geonameid : integer id of record in geonames database
name : name of geographical point (utf8) varchar(200)
asciiname : name of geographical point in ...
7
Why don't you use OSM's API?
A similar question was asked on gis:
How to get a list of OSM relations (id numbers) of cities and countries only?
6
The Open Data Policy and Executive Order are for federal datasets and does not mandate the same for state or local governments, although such policies does influence more local policies.
See http://www.data.gov/opendatasites for a large (but not comprehensive) listing of Open Data sites at the international, state and local levels.
For state-level open ...
6
I understand your question and it does relate to open data. It seems like you have a piece of open data: municipal service requests (i.e. "fix the pothole in front of my house!"). Your followup question is a good one: given the number of service requests, are these people just cranky, or are there actually more needed items to be fixed in a certain area?
I ...
6
POIA was proposed in California. See this blogpost by my former colleague Melanie Buck. http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/01/13/public-online-information-act-inspires-transparency-advocacy-in-california/
It also was proposed in eastern europe, although I cannot remember where anymore.
By the way, for more background information POIA, check out http://...
6
The closest law I've seen to being as comprehensive as POIA is NYC's Local Law 11, but many other cities have an open data law with looser language about whether "all" public data has to be put online.
More broadly speaking there's a fairly comprehensive list of city open data laws at:
http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Open_Data_Policy It's also worth noting ...
6
If you just want an API to get the County that encompasses a given Latitude and Longitude, the FCC's Census Block Conversions API is helpful.
6
While this won't be of help for a while, we at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) are beginning to develop a data set that may be helpful in the future. We received approval for a new data collection from Balancing Authorities in the lower 48 United States that will collect hourly generation, consumption, and transfer of electricity. The data ...
6
UN/LOCODE includes over 103,034 locations in 249 countries and installations in international waters. It is used by most major shipping companies, by freight forwarders and in the manufacturing industry around the world. It is also applied by national governments and in trade related activities, such as statistics where it is used by the European Union, by ...
6
i think open ei has this in their building energy data book:
http://en.openei.org/doe-opendata/dataset/buildings-energy-data-book
here's a section from that which is a survey of building energy consumption and extends past 2011:
http://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/
lastly, try the data hub for the energy performance of buildings for the eu:
...
6
I have a CSV file you can download that lists all US cities by state. The data was compiled from the US Census 2013 Gazetteer.
http://www.opengeocode.org/download.php#statecity
In case you must have the data from that domain, each state's information is listed on the states index pagef, and follows similar naming conventions. For example, here's Virginia'...
6
The data you want are in these files.
The primary source for this data was a US Census Bureau dataset of ~7500 incorporated cities whose populations surpassed 2500 people at some point in their existence. Additional cities were added from a variety of sources (...)
5
If you're looking for demographic information, the U.S. Census Bureau data could be helpful, especially the American Communities Survey. The QuickFacts section states that:
State and County QuickFacts provides frequently requested Census Bureau information at the national, state, county, and city level.
The primary long form Census data are only ...
5
NYC has its Open Data Law here -
http://nycopendata.pediacities.com/wiki/index.php/NYC_Open_Data
5
I don't know of a single website, however, Maryland Municipal League maintains a list of cities and towns in Maryland, and it also includes the names of municipalities that don't have websites.
Most state municipal leagues should have a list, but they won't all be organized the same. For instance, Michigan is one page per letter; Virginia wraps theirs in ...
5
I concur with Kotebiya. MSAs are identified by a CBSA identifier. Below is the definition from the Tiger line handbook (ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2013/2013-FolderNames-Defined.pdf)
CBSA Metropolitan Statistical Area / Micropolitan Statistical Area
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