I am very glad with the news at Geonames. The geographic data of the region where I live, Gipuzkoa in the Basque Country, has been liberated, put on the Internet (ceded to Geonames) with a liberal open license (CC-by), and made available to everybody thru Geonames's brilliant web services.

Nearly 250 locations have been corrected (moved to exact positions, and official and alternate names have been added, mostly in Basque), and other 750 new records were added, populated places most of them. The data set is from the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, the regional administration, and has been kindly provided by the officials in charge of the local public Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), the B5M office, as it is called there.

I took part on it, just brokering the contact, convinced B5m about the utility of open data and Geonames, and Geonames about the interest of the data provided. There are other wikipedia-like Geographic sites out there, but for me, Geonames is the Wikipedia of geography.

Previously, Gipuzkoa’s places looked like this in Geonames:

A regular distribution pattern of some scarce populated places, due to rounded coordinates of old gazetteers. And only Spanish names appeared, despite Basque forms being the official ones for 20 years or so. Now, that region appears like this:

More places, updated Basque official names show first (Spanish names haven’t been deleted, they remain there as alternate form), and exact locations. In the case of municipalities, for instance, latitude and longitude are those of the town hall.