georeferencing IATI activities

[Pelle Aardema]

Hi all,

I'm currently working with The Netherlands Red Cross, implementing the IATI standard to report about their projects.

As part of this effort we also want to geocode/georeference the activity locations.

Currently the activities only have a name and/or lat/long attached to them. 

I've been looking into using Geonames, and it seems pretty straightforward to lookup more details using their API, or even reverse-lookup (based on lat/long).

I was wondering if anyone has experience with OpenStreetmap. Are there similar services available (and are they as straightforward)? What are the main differences between the two gazetteers? Which one provides better coverage (main interest Africa)?

Any experiences or pointers are welcome!

Thanks,

Pelle Aardema

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Pelle Aardema 

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twitter: @pelleaardema

[Tim Davies]

Hello Pele,

I don't know about coverage, but for lookups of administrative geography based on Lat,Lng, the MySociey Global Mapit tool (http://global.mapit.mysociety.org/) provides a very handy wrapper around Open Street Map.

Tim

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[Pelle Aardema]

Thanks Tim,

That's very useful indeed!

Pelle

[ckreutz]

Hi Pelle,

just saw your post. ;-) 

I work with geo data in Africa using OSM and it is difficult as there is very little data available. There is more geo data from Tokyo than the whole African continent: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/08/digital-map-what-geoweb-gets-wrong-about-real-streets

My experience is that even in European countries most georeference service still do not work that accurate (at least the free and cheap ones). So you always need to do some manually work and particular for Africa it must involve a lot of manual work. 

Even if you extract a lot of administrative shapes from OSM, you still face many challenges. I worked on a project in Sierre Leone around EITI and I experienced that some provinces or district are spelled in various ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Sierra_Leone

There is certainly a lot happening, but for automatically georeference there is a long way to go. Ghana for example just started naming all streets in bigger cities. 

Best Christian 

[Sarah Johns]

Hello, we're just about to start doing some work cleaning up location data on some of UK NGO IATI data so having a consistent approach would be great. We've used Geonames previously, and will check out MapIt too. Pelle - let me know which you decide to go with?

Cheers, Sarah