Metro areas

[Ryan]

Is there any place in geonames for "Metro Areas". For instance,
"Tampa Bay" is a used semantic aggregation of Tampa, Florida, US with
other cities around the bay. It is not a legitimate or technical
government division but it is definitely something that refers to an
area. On the other hand, it might be confusing to have seemingly
repetitive Metro Area placemarkers for most large cities.

[Marc Wick]

I guess you are interested in the relation between the metro area and
the aggregated cities. A hierarchical relation is so far only supported
for administrative divisions.

[Ryan Levering]

Actually, I'm not interested in the hierarchy. Or at least that's not
my main goal. I just want to have this information in the DB
associated with locations. So if there was something called "Tampa
Bay" or "Greater London", etc. with a marker roughly center of the
overall area and a feature class of something appropriate, that would
be fine. Then it would be in the DB and make sense to a query for
that location. It seems weird that "Tampa Bay" doesn't show up in the
data, but I can find random store buildings in there. But they aren't
as discrete as the current types of locations, so it might make the
data more subjective.

[Marc Wick]

There is no feature code for metropolitan areas. There are three more
generic codes for areas:

AREA area a tract of land without homogeneous character or boundaries
RGN region an area distinguished by one or more observable physical or
cultural characteristics
RGNE economic region a region of a country established for economic
development or for statistical purposes

http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html

I guess RGNE (economic region) comes closest to what you need.

Best

Marc