Tripter Blog

Tripter has thousands of city names translated into DOZENS of languages and is considering making them them publicly available via an open copyright license. It seems a shame that every researcher who needs translated place names needs to hire a team of translators, so we’d like to share our data. If GIS software makers had easy access to a database of translated place names their GIS software would be accessible to millions of people in their native language.
Each of our place names has a standardized (non-proprietary) UFI (uniform feature indicator) number, so our data could form the basis of a translated place name GIS reference. We could also easily add tens-of-thousands more translated place names if interest develops.

The thing is, we’d think somebody would have already done this, but we can’t find anyone who has. Heck, we couldn’t even find anyone willing to sell us translated place names…and we think we’re pretty good researchers. We want to make sure we’re not duplicating another effort, so it’s time to start calling around and posting into the void:

DOES ANYONE KNOW OF A COMPANY OR PROJECT THAT PROVIDES TRANSLATED PLACE NAMES - WHETHER FOR SALE OR FREE? ……OR free?……or free?…
Let’s start moving ahead anyway. Here are some issues we would need to resolve:

• What license should we release our data under?
• Is Tripter sure it doesn’t want to sell data?
• What open license will Tripter accept?
• Will certain licenses prevent the data from being used in places we’d like it to be available?
• What format should we provide it in for download?
• Excel, TSV, CSV
• Wiki (think wiktionary)
• Will users have the option to download a subset of the data, especially as the DB grows?
• Will people be able to contribute, amend, and discuss the data (a wiki might help with that).
• etc.

We look forward to discussing these ideas with anybody who’s interested.