Seeking 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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

http://kelsocartography.com/downloads/gis/2012/natural_earth/ne_2.0.0_rc2/natural_earth_2.0.0_rc2_vector/

Quick Start: http://kelsocartography.com/downloads/gis/2012/natural_earth/ne_2.0.0_rc2/natural_earth_2.0.0_rc2_vector/Natural_Earth_quick_start_2.0.0_rc2.zip

18-Aug-2012 17:59 234M

Answer 3

Give it a try to the files hosted here:

http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php

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)

Answer 4

If you just want the names, try geonames.org

http://www.geonames.org/countries/

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

Answer 5

There is a countries, regions and cities database database dump hosted on Github. Might be useful for MySQL users

Answer 6

Have a look at naturalearth, that should cover your need

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software