A Basque region gives its public data to Geonames
March 21, 2007
Gipuzkoa is a territory in northern Spain, with its own parliament, part of the autonomous region of the Basque Country. It’s located in the westernmost part of the Pyrenees, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, in the borderline between France and Spain. It’s surface is around 2,000 km2 and nearly 700,000 inhabitants.
The geographic data of the region has just been greatly enhanced in Geonames. 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 local 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.
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.
This addition follows the path of another public data upload we had recently, that one from Brazil. It is encouraging when public administrations decide to share their data openly, as in these cases. At the same time, this is the way to avoid embarrassing situations like outdated data appearing in online maps, as the Hitler-berg case shows. If you know about interesting free data sets from your country, please let us know. We are eager to integrate them.
The records of this load have been locked for updates by the anonymous user as this official SDI body is definitely a trustworthy data source.