Database Reference
In-Depth Information
This is one of the simplest but most useful data sets for geographic applications. It's a CSV ile
containing information on 2.7 million cities and towns around the world. It has the latitude and
longitude coordinates, region, country, and alternate names for all of them, and the population
for many thanks to
Stefan Helder's data
. You can just load this ile into your favorite database,
index by the key you want to query on, and you've got a perfectly workable local service for
working with addresses and other locations:
...
us,new woodstock,New Woodstock,NY,,42.8483333,-75.8547222
us,new york,New York,NY,8107916,40.7141667,-74.0063889
us,new york mills,New York Mills,NY,,43.1052778,-75.2916667
us,newark,Newark,NY,9365,43.0466667,-77.0955556
...
Companies
TechCrunch has accumulated information on more than 50,000 companies and 70,000 people
and has made it available both through a web interface and a simple REST/JSON API. You don't
need to authenticate, and it's all under a Creative Commons license. There aren't any oicial bulk
downloads available, but I created the
CrunchCrawl
project to use the API to pull down inform-
ation about all companies in the system.
To get information about a particular company, you'll irst need to search on its name to ind the
CrunchBase ID; then you can access the full set of data. As you might imagine, the database has
excellent coverage of technology companies but very little on other industries:
curl "http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/company/facebook.js"
{"name": "Facebook",
"permalink": "facebook",
"crunchbase_url": "http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook",
"homepage_url": "http://facebook.com",
"blog_url": "http://blog.facebook.com",
"blog_feed_url": "http://blog.facebook.com/atom.php",
"twitter_username": "facebook",
...
