Country/Regions Database

Ziycon

I'm looking at MaxMind for their free world cities database as I need the database for an application.

Also looking for advice as to how the data should be related, my thinking is below.

Country -> Region -> City

Relationship:
- Country has many regions
- Region has one country and many cities
- City has one region

Then there would be manually entered data like:
- Street number & name
- Town

Any help/advice greatly appreciated and if anyone has any experience with MaxMind data sets advice/experiences would be helpful.

onemorechance

Depends on what you define as a region. For example, if you define Ulster as a region, it has two countries. I'm sure there are many examples of this, Basque Country is another. In these cases region can belong to multiple countries.

Ziycon

Thanks for your reply onemorechance

This is where I'm getting confused as to what region is, as the application will be able to take data from anywhere in the world I'm confused as to how county/state/region/province data works and how it should be related, country and city is grand.

Has anyone used the MaxMind data, is region the middle-man between country and city!?

How do other sites handle it!?

onemorechance

Try this website, it has various examples taken from the postal services in various countries.

http://www.bitboost.com

Talisman

It's been a few years since I had access to a MaxMind GeoIP database but from what I remember it wasn't that accurate in terms of the region/state.

The field list which you are interested in is something like:
CountryCode -> IE
CountryName -> Ireland
RegionCode -> DUB
RegionName -> Dublin City
CityName -> Dublin

If you go to any of the GeoIP tracking websites they will report essentially the same data, e.g. whatismyipaddress.com, www.ipinfodb.com. You could try playing around with the Google APIs, chances are they use the same structure.

Ziycon

Thanks folks, I'll have a look at those.

Talisman

I had forgotten to add the link to the freely available databases on the Maxmind developer website so here it is.

GeoLite Free Downloadable Databases

The databases are updated the first week of every month - the GeoLite databases aren't as accurate as the full GeoIP database but they should meet your requirements as they use the exact same fields.

peeboo

We are using the IP2Location Lite DB11 as we need the lat/long and ZIP for mapping our users into nearest store for one of our project.