Gazatteer: Identification Information

National Imagery and Mapping Agency's (NIMA)

1994

World Gazetteer (Major Cities)

unknown

The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) provides access to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency's (NIMA) database of foreign geographic feature names. Approximately 20,000 of the database's 3.5 million features are updated monthly with names information approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (US BGN).

The Major Cities layer in the Global GIS database was created by extracting populated places with native names only which gave us 9498 of 2095063. Then to reduce the set further we extracted only the cities with the feature code of “Capital of first order administrative division” (PPLA) or “Capital of Country” (PPLC). This left many large populated cities off the list. To help account for the larger populated cities, we merged some data from the ESRI World Cities database. Any city without a Gaz_name entry in the table was merged from the ESRI dataset ESRI. For the North America tile and Global DVD we added the Major Cities database from the National Atlas (Geographic Names Information System ) for US names. The US Fips code was saved in the Unique_nam field. The Gaz_name field contains the original string from the Full_name field. The Full_name field was processed to replace some of the unrecognizable diacritical symbols.

none

It is ultimately the user's responsibility to assess the accuracy and completeness of a data set extracted from the database and to determine if these are sufficient for the purposes to which the data-set would be applied.

available online, see online linkage below

NIMA Operational Help Desk (ESICS/L-88)

National Imagery and Mapping Agency's (NIMA)

3200 South Second Street

St. Louis

MO

63118-3399

USA

Entity and Attribute Information
(table heading explanations)