The Global Gazetteer

The core of The Global Gazetteer is a database of more than four million populated places around the world. The basic information provided on a geographical location, such as latitude and longitude, is extensively enriched with additional data such as population, postcodes, telephone dialling codes, etc, as detailed below.

The Global Gazetteer is actually a set of databases covering populated places, ports and airports, points of interest, administrative areas and countries. The data held includes locational, physical and demographic data.

Some of The Global Gazetteer- related databases will be of particular interest to those involved in mailing and address management as they contain detailed data on titles, addresses, and address-related issues.

This page contains information about the fields and types of data held. Related information can be viewed in some population statistics and world-wide statistics summarised by field.

Our Statistics page lists the various sets of statistical data available to view.

A compete list of all fields is included in the downloadable sample data. Details can be found from our free data and downloads page.

Pricing information for The Global Gazetteer is available here.

Summary of fields in the database

The main data file contains records for places that are, in the main, populated (cities, towns villages, etc), together with records for ports, airports and some 400,000 other “points of interest”.

The following table provides information on the data fields that we collect, a sample of the field and the number of records in the file that contains that data.

This sample has been drawn from the place record for Munich but some data has been added for illustrative purposes and would not in reality apply to that record (examples marked ** below).

Please note: not all data is held for all records.

Please follow these links to the relevant sample table, which shows the fields included:

Name information
Administrative information
Location information
Other information

* The V indicator in the following tables signifies that the field is Validated, either from a fixed list of codes (V) or from another file (eg V-COUNTRIES)

A full description of Gazetteer fields in Adobe Acrobat v3 format is available from our free sample data and downloads page.

**Name** **information**
Field	Example	No of records	Notes
Place name in standard Roman characters	Munchen	4,175,224
Place name with ISO 10446/Unicode encoding of diacritic characters	M<00FC>nchen	854,261
Preferred name of place (V - TOWNS) *	Munchen **	5,389	This field would only appear in the non-preferred record for 'Munich'
Reason for being the preferred name (V) *	DEU	17,623	Country code used to indicate that it is the native name for the place
Reason for being a non-preferred name (V) *	EN **	1,146	ISO country or language code used to indicate that 'Munich' is the English name for the place

**Administrative information**
Field	Example	Number of records	Notes
Country code	DEU	4,175,224
Major town name (if the record is of a dependent locality or district) (V-TOWNS) *	Watford *	805,281
Administrative level 1 (county, state, province, etc) (V-COUNTIES) *	BY	3,245,743
Lowest administrative level above place (V-COUNTIES) *	Munchen	1,050,947
Administrative category (county seat, state capital, etc) (V) *	ADM1,ADM2,ADM3	27,267	Place is a capital of several areas (Land, Region, etc)
Type of place (V) * (generally an official designation, eg commune, village, municipal borough, etc but also whether a place is a resort or tourist centre)	STADT, KFS	399,605	Place is a Stadt, and a KreisFreie Stadt
Official code number(s) for place	09162000	568,574
NUTS level	5

**Locational information**
Field	Example	No. of records
Latitude (deg.min); Latitude seconds; Latitude orientation (N/S)	48.08;22;N	2,944,715
Longitude (deg.min); Longitude seconds; Longitude orientation (E/W)	11.34;26;E	2,944,715
Decimal latitude; Decimal longitude	48.1394;11.5738	2,944,715
Grid system eastings; Grid system northings	4468300;5333400
Time zone plus/minus; Time zone hours difference	+1.00	4,175,224

**Other information**
Field	Example	No. of records	Notes
Postcode(s)	80001	1,333,307
Telephone area code(s)	89	120,855
Population; Population date; Population source	1236370;1996	290,101
Height and units of height (ft/m)	518M	179,093
Area; Area units (ha, km²)	31047HA	101,199
Daylight saving time (minutes); data on exact date & change to and from DST	60	4,175,224
Whether a place has hotels			Can be used as measure of importance for smaller places
IATA code for airport serving the place.	MUC
IATA code or UN LOCODE for the place	MUC
CRESTA zone code for the place	80
Other statistical data

Updated: 13 October 2003