Country/State/City Database?
Possible Duplicate:
Database of Countries and their Cities
Ok, this one is a non technical question. I am creating a business directory and I'd like to categorize listings by location. Instead of giving users an option to enter the location, I am going to provide them with a list of locations which follow a Country/State/City format. I tried GeoWorldMap by GeoBytes. It looked promising in the beginning and I felt that is exactly what would get the job done until I realized it provided a list of around 275 countries even though the number of countries that are recognized is between 192 to 195. So I am not sure about the extra 80 countries. When I realized this issue, I went to their website to do some reckon and found out that their list is updated on a regular basis. So this brings a question to my mind. Is it possible to find an accurate database that lists all possible locations? What do most developers here use for something like this?
Answer
Excellent question. I think Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet can be very useful for this: they provide a pretty exhaustive list of places and the hierarchical relationships between them, and you can either download the list of names or use their API.
Other gazetteers (that's the term-of-art you're looking for) include GeoNames, which also has downloadable data free of charge. (I'm sure StackOverflow or even a Google search could get you more options along the same lines.)
Also, if you're planning to create a UI to let users select from your list of places, I like to suggest the Freebase Suggest plugin, a jQuery plugin that will force users to select from a certain category (in your case, countries, say) and provide a nice UI for choosing from what Freebase's semantic database considers correct. It even provides some wiki-like context to help with disambiguation.