Online gazetteers

[Alfred F. Newton]

     Roger Blahnik's recent query about a Peruvian locality (to which I
responded directly) prompts this note calling attention to several excellent
resources now available to those with WWW access.
     The massive data set of place names and other features of the world
maintained by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is available through the
U.S.G.S. Geographic Names Information System home page at:
     http://www-nmd.usgs.gov/www/gnis/index.html
The U.S. data are available online through the "GNIS Online Data Base",
maintained by USGS, and data for all other countries are available through
the "GEOnet Names Server", maintained by the Defense Mapping Agency.
     In the case of the GEOnet Names Server, access is somewhat restricted
and requires a password, but the instructions there indicate how to apply
for one online (it took about 2 days to get set up in my case) and also
allow "sampling" of the database with a "guest" password.  The data for most
countries are comparable to the most recent published USBGN gazetteers, but
are more complete or recently updated in some cases.  As in the printed
versions, states and provinces are indicated by a code, but there is no
online key to these codes as part of the database (this will be added
eventually according to the manager).  The codes are "FIPS 10-3" codes
according to the documentation, and the latest version of these (FIPS 10-4)
which seems to work for most countries is available at:
http://www.nist.gov/itl/lab/fips/fips10-4.txt
     The Canadian equivalent of USBGN maintains a more detailed gazetteer of
that country at:  http://ellesmere.ccm.emr.ca/cgndb/english/HomeEng.html
     If anyone knows of similar or more detailed resources available for
other countries, could they please post a notice of these to TAXACOM?

Alfred F. Newton  (newton at fmnh.org)
Field Museum of Natural History - Zoology, Insects
Chicago, IL 60605 USA
     tel. 312-922-9410 ext. 263;  fax 312-663-5397