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One of the common problems with Web Mapping applications is that what end users regard as a place often does not match the ‘official’ place names in the commercial gazetteer data that web mapping services depend on for geocoding.  For example in London everyone knows where “Soho“, “Bloomsbury” and “Big Ben” are, but in reality these are not official place names.  These kind of unofficial place names are often referred to as “Vanity Areas”.  End users rightly expect that there web mapping application will take them to these places, but if we rely on commercial gazetteer data alone this is not enough.

Sp how can we fix this?  Well, Multimap have integrated GeoNames as an additional data source for address look-ups. You can see it in action not only on multimap.com, but also in the Multimap API. 

From the Multimap blog:

GeoNames is a global geographical database that contains over 6.5 million places, with 2 million alternative names in up to 200 languages, that is continuously updated by users around the world, through a friendly wiki interface. Any changes are integrated into the Multimap databases within 24 hours.

GeoNames contains geographic places such as mountains, seas, lakes, valleys, coasts, and places of interest. In addition, it also contains alternative names so you can find a place like ‘London’ in many different languages (Londres, Londra, Londýn, Londain, Londinium).

A great example cropped up recently with a customer I work with.  They had recently developed a new web mapping application and were demoing it to all their local sites.  They knew that one local web master always tested mapping applications by searching for the small hamlet in which they lived in.  This hamlet is so small it does not appear in any of the commercial gazetteers.  So they added this hamlet to Geonames before doing the demo.  When the web master saw the application and found their hamlet they said it was the best web mapping application they had seen!

It is also possible to integrate Geonames with Virtual Earth.  Johannes Kebeck has done a blog post on this.