Where can I get country, region, and city data?

Question

I need the names of countries, country regions and cities of the world.

Where do I get that kind of information?

Andrew Dwyer · Answer 1 · 2011-02-10 04:36:40Z

up vote 7 down vote

Try the data provided by Natural Earth at http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

Multiple datasets are provided including countries, states, populated places, urban areas etc

You can also download a database of over 8 million place names from http://www.geonames.org/ but that may be overkill for what you're looking for.

edited Feb 10 '11 at 4:36

answered Feb 10 '11 at 4:29

Andrew Dwyer
713

Natural Earth v2 has many hours of data cleanup improving the quality of the data throughout. Released August 2012 – Mapperz♦ Aug 22 '12 at 13:12

Mapperz · Answer 2 · 2012-08-21 21:36:36Z

Natural Earth Version 2 [Out this week 18th August 2012]

enter image description here

18-Aug-2012 17:59 234M

relima · Answer 3 · 2011-02-09 23:52:04Z

Give it a try to the files hosted here:

The dataset is available in shapefile format:

TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.zip (3,380 kB)

TM_WORLD_BORDERS_SIMPL-0.3.zip (226 kB)

Spacedman · Answer 4 · 2011-02-10 08:30:40Z

up vote 3 down vote

If you just want the names, try geonames.org

get you the countries. Drill down for cities, or download their datafiles for everything.

answered Feb 10 '11 at 8:30

Spacedman
2,287315

4 Answers