[OSGeo-Discuss] WorldCities database Free and OpenSource

[Andrew Turner]

Lester Caine wrote:
> António Rocha wrote:
>> Greetings
>> I'm doing a small tool to calculate distances between cities. I mean, I
>> enter City of origin geographic position and city of destination
>> geographic position and I calculate distances. The thing is, everytime I
>> have to check at GOOGLE Earth a city position and it's getting to be a
>> long a heavy task to do.
>> I realized that, this guys
>> http://www.assemblysys.com/dataservices/db_details.php?db=3 are
>> distributing a database with cities geographic positions but this is
>> PAID :( . What I wanted to know is if there is any
>> tool/software/database free, open source where I can do exacly the same
>> without having to pay for that. And even, maybe add a few cities
>> positions and contribute to the project 
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/ 

Also http://geonames.org
Which has an API and downloadable database of placenames.

Andrew