Web

This time I needed some geographical data evaluation for one of my current projects. The data used to be opensource and as possible qualitative and complete. After spending some time in front of the famous search engine window there was a solution:

http://www.geonames.org/

That's the first sentence from the site:

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

Geonames is used by number of sites. Besides data it has also web services and code libraries in many programming languages to access them.