Are there tags for cities and towns anywhere please?

[Håvard Hjulstad]

"LOCODES"; you find them several places on the Web.

Håvard Hjulstad

------- Original Message -------
On
Fri, 21 Nov 2003 08:54:44 -0000 William Overington wrote:

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