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→GEONAMES
===Storage methods===
When we think about places, we tend to think of them in our own situation. So, I might live at 135 Copley Place, Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA. (I don't). I think of them , in order, as Address, Suburb, City, State and Country. Other places use different nomenclature - county, province, cityprefecture, arondisment...to name just a few.
In the world of databases, parsing an address like the one above would be most inefficient - if it culd be done at all. It is better to use the database and its strengths to assist us. So, I would prefer to think of them all those geographic descriptors as "levels", starting with the country (we can all agree on that, I think) as the base level - Level 0 - and then moving on to Level 1 etc. Having defined our Level 0, all Level 1s are therefore sub-ordinate to it.
So the computer application will think in reverse to us, preferring to start with a country, then finding the names of the places sub-ordinate to it, and so on. Accordingly, the database setup needs to reflect this:
