Are there tags for cities and towns anywhere please?

[William Overington]

I am writing to enquire as to whether there are tags for cities and towns
anywhere.

If not, could such a list be started please?  What would need to be done
administratively and what would be the best format for the codes?

I am aware that various cities and towns have their names translated into
local languages.  For example, the Italian city Firenze is localized into
English as Florence, the English city of London is localized into French as
Londres.  The German city of Mainz is localized unchanged into English, yet
is localized into French.  Smaller cities and towns are often localized
unchanged.

The specific application which I have in mind is localization of
pan-European weather information for localization on interactive television
displays.  For example, a message which means in English, "It is snowing in
London" would be broadcast as a Unicode Private Use Area character to
indicate "It is snowing in (city or town)." together with a "city or town"
code tag for London between special bracket characters.  An interactive
television set would then localize this into the language for which it is
set using a database.  The Java program and a collection of language
specific databases to do this would be broadcast as one of the application
programs of the interactive television system.  The database would include a
list of city and town codes and the localized versions of the names.  There
would also be another pair of special bracket characters between which a
name not to be localized could be placed as an alternative.  Thus, with
codes for "It is snowing in (city or town)." and "It is raining in (city or
town)." and so on, together with sentences such as "The temperature in (city
or town) is (number) degrees Celsius.", weather information could be
broadcast in encoded format and straightforwardly localized into many
languages.

William Overington

21 November 2003