Cognised existence: Geographical names are the human identifiers for places — cities, villages, mountains, rivers, regions. They are the primary keys for geocoding and the spatial anchors for most human communication about place.
Question: What is the name and location of a place or topographic feature?
OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place | https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name
Realisations
Instead of hardcoding implementation schemas here, SPHERE separates semantic meaning from dataset implementation. See the following realisations for how to access this data:
- [[Realisations/OpenStreetMap_geographical_names|OpenStreetMap —
place=*,name=*]] - [[Realisations/Natural_Earth_geographical_names|Natural Earth —
ne_10m_populated_places]]
Geometry Representations
| Rep ID | Source Dataset | Geometry Type | Native CRS | Suitable For | Not Suitable For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
names_osm_points | OSM via Geofabrik | Point | EPSG:4326 | Geocoding, labelling, proximity search | Area-based aggregation (use admin boundary polygons instead) |
names_ne_10m_points | Natural Earth 10m populated places | Point | EPSG:4326 | Global reference labelling, settlement hierarchy maps, continental-scale geocoding | Sub-national name coverage, local gazetteers |
Limitations
- Population data is very sparse and not reliably maintained.
- City/town/village classification is inconsistent across countries.
- For authoritative national gazetteers, prefer official national datasets.