GEOnet Names Server

The GEOnet Names Server ( GNS, "Network Server Geographical Names " ) is a database of the Earth Info ( " Erdinfo " ) project of the National Geospatial -Intelligence Agency (NGA, "National Geographical coordinates information service" ) of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Use

The use of the database anyone is free and can be done for both military and civilian purposes. Thus, the data from the CIA World Factbook can each be assigned geographic earth coordinates and plotted on electronic maps.

In the context of third party projects, it is possible to download a limited GIS data base. It is zip-compressed tab- delimited text files, with the entire database contains 5,517,082 entries (as of March 5, 2005 ) of about four million names and territories outside the United States, including their geo-coordinates, type, Administrative allocation and size specification. The fields can be easily read in a relational database system.

The accuracy of the data is limited, a large part is rounded to minutes of arc. The description of the NGA itself indicates that it is only approximate and that will serve to locate the objects. The coordinate system is based on WGS84, which is also used for GPS.