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I'm developing an application that calculates the distance between cities using their respective Longitude and Latitude values.

But the problem is where to get a comprehensive list of latitude and longitude values of these cities?

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I'd look around developers.google.com/maps and wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API for a start – Morawski Mar 19 '12 at 9:14

migrated from programmers.stackexchange.com Mar 19 '12 at 11:08

6 Answers

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This is pretty much the standard as far as I'm aware:

MaxMind GeoLite

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I don't get it, how is this a list of global cities? Is this link even correct? Shouldn't it point to GeoliteCity? – Günther Mar 22 '12 at 14:06
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Don't forget about Geonames dataset:

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

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download a "cities" file at download.geonames.org/export/dump – Mike Toews Mar 19 '12 at 18:34
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Natural Earth's Populated Places could be another option.

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Thanks for the help. But i was looking for Latitude and Longitudes of Cities round the world. – dotman14 Mar 19 '12 at 12:07
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@dotman14: Dataset is meant to consist of all admin-0 and many admin-1 capitals, major cities and towns, plus a sampling of smaller towns in sparsely inhabited regions. And latlon values can be found as two columns inside DBF file. – radek Mar 19 '12 at 12:53
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You could also extract the data from OpenStreetMap (using e.g. their API, as described here), or simply from Wikipedia. Most Wikipedia pages for cities have the city's coordinates.

Of course, this would require a bit of scripting, and possibly a list of the cities you want.

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up vote 1 down vote

Here is another option for Global Cities: GRUMP version 1 now has a free layer of settlement points with attributes, such as population size.

http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/grump-v1-settlement-points

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up vote 0 down vote

I'm using the geodata from www.ip2location.com

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While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. – iant♦ Aug 14 '12 at 10:26

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