World Locate Premium

Technical Detail

The Data

Collins Bartholomew World Locate Premium is a world gazetteer with ~3,600,000 names for ~2,600,000 unique places.

Each place in the gazetteer is given a coordinate location which refers to the designated centre of a settlement, the approximate centre of an area feature, an arbitrary point along a linear feature or the location of the name of a land feature. The coordinates of the feature are stored as longitude and latitude in decimal degrees.

Places are classified by the country and admin division they fall within. 1st order administrative division are complete almost 190 countries with 99.4% of towns worldwide assigned to their 1st order admin division.

Data Format

The standard format for distribution of World Locate Premium is as a colon delimited text file for easy integration within a wide range of software applications. It is also available as a point feature class within an ESRI file geodatabase. Other formats may be available on request.

The character set used is Unicode UTF-8 by default.

Geographic Coverage

World Locate covers the entire globe: -180,-90 south west to 180,90 north east

Coordinate Information

Coordinate system – Geographic coordinates – longitude, latitude

Units – decimal degrees, also expressed as degree and minute values

Product Update Cycles

World Locate Premium is updated continuously and released in March, June, September and December each year.

Structure

World Locate Premium is split into two files – one for main feature names and one for alternative names. The following tables describe the attributes included in each of the two files.

Main Feature Names – WorldLocatePremium_Main

Field	Description	Coverage	Example	Example
Link_ID	A unique identifier for the feature, which links to other Collins Bartholomew data products, including the alternative names table.	All places	219437	218089
Map_Name	The name that would normally be shown on a map, usually in local form	All places	Köln	Ostrov Greem-Bell
Index_Name	The name that would normally be used in an index, physical names are permuted	All places	Köln	Greem-Bell, Ostrov
Search_Name	Name in lowercase without spaces or diacritics to facilitate searching	All places	koln	ostrovgreembell
Country	The country the place falls within	All places	Germany	Russian Federation
Country_ID	The unique Link ID identifier for the country	All places	207005	207099
Country_ISO	The ISO 3166 code for the country	All towns where relevant	DE
Admin1	The first order admin division the place falls within	99% of towns	Nordrhein-Westfalen	Arkhangel`skaya Oblast`
Admin1_ID	The unique Link ID identifier for the admin1 division	99 % of towns	380684	708804
Admin2	The second order admin division the place falls within	Some towns	Köln
Admin2_ID	The unique Link ID identifier for the admin2 division	Some towns	215979
Admin_ISO	The ISO 3166-2 code for the admin division. This generally corresponds to our depiction of Admin1 but will be the Admin2 for countries with ‘super-regions’, i.e. in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, France, Italy, Maldives, Nepal, Spain, and United Kingdom.	99 % of towns	DE-NW
Physical_Locator	The physical locator for the place, normally an island name	Relevant towns, some other features		Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa
Physical_Locator_ID	The unique Link ID identifier for the physical locator	Relevant towns, some other features		220460
Feature_Class_Name	The Collins Bartholomew feature classification in text format	All places	2ND ORDER ADMIN CAPITAL 3 MILLION TO 4 MILLION	LANDSCAPE NAME SIZE 2
Feature_Class_ID	The ID of the Collins Bartholomew feature classification, links to other Collins Bartholomew data products	All places	206236	197115
Descriptor	The term that would normally be used to describe the feature in an index	All non-town features		ISLAND
Population	The latest population for the place	Larger towns, admin divisions and countries	3084000
Height	The height in metres for larger mountains, hills, volcanoes etc.	Relevant physical features
Latitude_Decimal	Latitude coordinate in decimal form	All places	50.93362	80.87210083
Longitude_Decimal	Longitude coordinate in decimal form	All places	6.95533	64.04403154
Latitude_Degree	Latitude coordinate, degree part	All places	50	80
Latitude_Minute	Latitude coordinate, minute part	All places	56	52
Latitude_Hemisphere	Latitude hemisphere, N or S	All places	N	N
Longitude_Degree	Longitude coordinate, degree part	All places	6	64
Longitude_Minute	Longitude coordinate, minute part	All places	57	3
Longitude_Hemisphere	Longitude hemisphere, N or S	All places	E	E
Time_Zone_Code	Major time zone code	All towns	P0100
Time_Zone_Name	The name the time zone is known by	All towns	Central European Time
Time_Zone_Name_DST	The name the time zone is known by when DST is on	All towns	Central European Summer Time
DST_Flag	Y/N flag to indicate if Daylight Saving Time is used	All towns	Y
DST_On_Date	Date the next period of Daylight Saving Time starts	Relevant Towns	27-MAR-11
DST_Off_Date	Date the next period of Daylight Saving Time ends	Relevant Towns	30-OCT-11
UTC_Offset	Number of hours offset from Greenwich Mean Time	All towns	1
Time_Zone_Unique_ID	Unique ID for combination of time zone and DST	All towns	53

Alternative Names – WorldLocatePremium_Alts

Field	Description	Example	Example
Alt_ID	A unique identifier for the specific alternative name	663664	930
Link_ID	A unique identifier for the feature, which can be used to connect the alternative name to the correct feature in the main table.	219437	218089
Alt_Map_Name	An alternative name for the feature	Cologne	Graham Bell Island
Alt_Index_Name	An alternative name that would normally be used in an index, physical names are permuted	Cologne	Graham Bell Island
Alt_Type	Used to identify what type of alternative name is listed. Possibilities are: ALT: A simple alternative name by which the place is sometimes known CONV: A widely recognised English Conventional name form EXONYM: The name in a language other than that spoken locally EXONYMCONV: A conventional name in a language other than that spoken locally FORM: A former name used within the last 50 years HIST: A former name used more than 50 years ago LONG: Long form name SHORT: Short form name	EXONYM	CONV
Language_ISO	If ALT_TYPE = EXONYM then this field indicates which language by the language’s ISO code (ISO 639).	FRE	–
Language_Name	If ALT_TYPE = EXONYM then this field indicates which language by name	FRENCH	–

Quality Standards

Collins Bartholomew takes the greatest of care in assuring the high quality of our data. The data is constantly being updated and revised, with an average of 40,000 name edits each year.

All our database updates are thoroughly researched by our highly dedicated in-house team of professional cartographers and information researchers.

We also use external experts, specialist organisations, official organisations, agencies, government departments and business offices to assist in the information gathering process.

Policy changes (e.g. international boundary changes, new country depiction, name changes) are informed by external experts. For advice on name forms we look to the PCGN (the UK government’s Permanent Committee on Geographic Names for British Official Use) and BGN (US Board on Geographic Names) plus of course local/country specific information. From this we would make our decision on the ‘de facto’ stance and apply geographical expertise to work out the details.

Licensing

World Locate Premium is available as a standalone dataset that you can download and store locally, or it can be accessed via one of our secure web services. Whichever you choose, our licence fees are based on the number of concurrent users with fees staring from £1250 per annum.