While developing
Find-A-Record, we realized we needed the ability to
geocode our data to shapes (place boundaries) as opposed to just coordinates. But that wasn't possible with any of the available services (OSM, Google, Geonames, etc) so we built something which can do it. We named it the
Open Place Database (OPD).
* Open data with the Open Database License (OBdl)
* Contain data for the whole world
* Contain historical data as opposed to just current
OPD is not designed to enable standardizing; it's designed to enable geocoding (and perhaps reverse geocoding in the future).
Questions? Concerns? Do you know of any juicy data sets we can get our hands on?