Geonames is a great dataset, in fact it's one of the "OG" open-source databases of the modern era, dating back to 2005.
It has fairly comprehensive coverage of countries, cities, and major landmarks. It also has stable, simple identifiers that are somewhat of a lingua-franca in the geospatial data world (i.e. Geonames ID 5139572 points to the Statue of Liberty and if you have other data that you need to unambiguously associate with the one Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, putting a `geonames_id` column in your database with that integer will pretty much solve it, and will allow anyone else you work with to understand the connection clearly too).
However, to be honest, it hasn't really kept pace with modern times. The velocity of changes and updates is pretty low, it doesn't actively grow the community anymore. The data format is simple and rigid and built on old tech that's increasingly hard to work with. You can trust Geonames to have the Statue of Liberty, but not the latest restaurants in NYC.
For a problem like the post author has of finding ways everyday people can easily navigate to something like a park bench that might not have a single address associated with it, or even if it does, needs more granularity to find _that_ specific bench in a park with 100 benches, Geonames probably won't help.
Source: I'm co-founder of Geocode Earth, one of the geocoding companies linked in the blog post. We use Geonames as one source of POI data amongst many others.
That does look interesting. I could search through it for a lat & long, but it looks like it only gives a name (e.g. "Silicon Oasis") without a corresponding country. Food for thought though.
You can use admin fields, and it’s a recursive query to find.
I have recursive CTE (thanks to ChatGPT).
Could also be done on save, since they shouldn’t change for locations.
The recursiveness though, gives you a benefit if you extract type and save the intermediate steps, it allows you to start grouping things together at different levels which is one of the use cases you mentioned.
Info and schema is here, https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt
Could be a good source. Not sure how good it is worldwide, but the countries I’ve used it for, it’s been useful and pretty good.
Try the search too, https://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=R%C3%ADo+grande&count...
Not just roads, but there’s rivers, and other things too