MeridianMERIDIAN

City Name

geography.location.city

Name of a city, town, or municipality. Locale-specific due to city name representation in different languages.

Casts to
VARCHAR
Scope
Locale-specific
Locales
EN, EN_AU, EN_GB, EN_CA, EN_US, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, PT_BR, RU, JA, ZH, KO, AR, HI, TR

Background

Origin

FineType defines geography.location.city itself, as the name of a city, town or municipality.[1] FineType marks the type as locale-specific because city names are represented differently in different languages.[1] FineType lists municipality and town as aliases of the type.[1]

One international register of place names used in trade is UN/LOCODE, the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations, developed and maintained by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).[2] The first issue of UN/LOCODE in 1981 contained codes for 8,000 locations.[2] The 2011 version of UN/LOCODE contained codes for about 82,000 locations.[2]

GeoNames, a user-editable geographical database, was founded in late 2005.[3]

Use

USPS Publication 28 places the city name in the last line of the address.[4] USPS Publication 28 strongly recommends that addresses use only approved Last Line (city) names as described in the Postal Service City State file.[4] USPS Publication 28 says city names should be spelled in their entirety.[5] When labelling constraints force an abbreviation, USPS Publication 28 allows only the approved 13-character abbreviations from the City State file.[5]

The US Census Bureau says an incorporated place usually is a city, town, village, or borough, but can have other legal descriptions.[6] The US Census Bureau delineates Census Designated Places for settled concentrations of population that are identifiable by name but are not legally incorporated.[6]

GeoNames records alternate names with ISO 639 language codes.[7] GeoNames flags historic alternate names, giving Bombay for Mumbai as its example.[7] GeoNames flags colloquial alternate names, giving Big Apple for New York as its example.[7] The Unicode CLDR date specification says that when no localised exemplar city exists for a time zone, the last field of the time zone ID is used with the prefix stripped and underscores turned into spaces, so America/Los_Angeles becomes Los Angeles.[8]

UN/LOCODE uses the same three letters, PAR, for Paris in France (FR PAR) and for Par in Cornwall (GB PAR).[2]

Sources

  1. [1]finetype/labels/definitions_geography.yaml at main · meridian-online/finetypeFineType
  2. [2]UN/LOCODEsecondary source
  3. [3]GeoNamessecondary source
  4. [4]22 Last Line of the Address | Postal Explorerdocumentation
  5. [5]223 Spelling of City Names | Postal Explorerdocumentation
  6. [6]Geography Program Glossarydocumentation
  7. [7]Readme for GeoNames Gazetteer extract filesdataset
  8. [8]Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML) Part 4: Datesstandard

Detection notes

v1 migration: Was address.city. Locale-specific for city name representation.

In Meridian's open data

Use it

CLI · DuckDB
$ finetype infer -i "New York" --mode column
→ geography.location.city

SELECT ft_infer('New York');
-- → 'geography.location.city'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)

Schema

https://meridian.online/schemas/geography.location.city · Frictionless type string

finetype taxonomy geography.location.city -o json-schema

Aliases

municipalitytown

Type Registry