GeoNames founder opens up the GIS world

How does GeoNames fund itself?

GeoNames is funded by donations, sponsors and most importantly by contributions in the form of data, know how and time.

The Google maps mashup, ongmap.com, which uses GeoNames technology, recently won first place in a competition organised by Sun Microsystems, Japan and donated some of its prize money to GeoNames. How much was this donation?

Yuki Naotori, the developer of ongmap.com, was so kind to contribute part of the prize money to open source projects he was using for the project. (GeoNames received a three digit Euro donation.)

Where have GeoNames largest financial contributions come from?

All contributions are from applications using the GeoNames data or web services ranging from smaller contributions of a couple of Euros by students to larger contributions of some hundred Euros by startups and established enterprises.

What is driving the interest in GeoNames?

The current interest in geo data is often driven by online mapping having become a commodity and part of every developers skill set. It no longer requires a GIS specialist to implement online mapping for an application. The ubiquity of GPS enabled devices is also engendering a new generation of applications in need of geo data. Another important factor is that most applications are now targeting a larger market and need data to geographically organize their site and content.

What other social networking sites or Web 2.0 sites in addition to Slide.com and linkedIn use Geonemaes?

Well, I have troubles nowadays to find a site that does not claim to have at least some social networking web2.0ish features or aspects ;-). Others include popfly, tagzania, dopplr, tripit, or globalmotion.

What is the biggest technical challenge involved in running GeoNames?

The main challenge is to deal with a huge number of data providers and the absence of gazetteer standards. In Australia for instance, we cannot use the place name data provided by the Australian Government as it is not freely available. Instead we have to contact the authorities of the states to ask for their data. Three states VIC, SA and NSW have so far offered their data to GeoNames. All of them are using different data formats and feature types and we have to process each source differently, also making sure we do not insert duplicates to the already existing locations.

It is interesting that we have more liberal access to US Army data than to European or Australian "public" data.