Monday, March 27, 2017

Geo-referencing the location of a place from its name

If you need to geo-reference your data based on the name of a location, there are a handful of useful websites that allow you to search by the name of a location around the world (outside the US) to obtain the latitude and longitude of that location:

GeoNames



National Geospatial-Intelligent Agency (NGA) GEOnet Names Server

  • According to Strandow et al. (2011), this website "often contains more alternate spellings than Geonames." If you cannot find a location on GeoNames, therefore, try this server to find an alternate spelling, which you can search on GeoNames.


Global Gazetteer Version 2.3
JRC Fuzzy Gazetteer

  • It retrieves place names even if the spelling does not match perfectly. This is useful because English spellings of foreign place names rarely are standardized.
  • Gleditsch and Weidmann (2012) recommends 


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