World.db - A Free Open World Database and Schema

This would be more interesting if it included the official country codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code

What's the advantage of this over the geonames database (CC-BY) which seems to be more comprehensive ?

If the Heroku app is up to date, there are only 62 countries and 126 cities and all names are in German. I think this should have been mentioned in the Github page.

Why is this a ruby project, and not just a plain files to create the tables, and insert the values?

Also, please teach him something about database normalization. e.g. capital should not be a flag of cities, but a foreign key of regions and countries. Cities, Regions and countries should be combined into one table, with a foreign keys pointing up and down the chain, from world down to suburb level.

Based on the fact that this database is free and public domain, apparently it's possible for such data to have a restrictive license. So, I'm wonder what the sources of this data are? Is it compiled from public resources from the governments listed, determined and measured by hand by visiting the countries (with a GPS device in hand :P), or something else? I couldn't find this information on github.

Country names are incorrect. Totally inaccurate.

See my issue report: https://github.com/geraldb/world.db/issues/1

related: http://mledoze.github.com/countries/

Here's a (django specific) alternative: https://github.com/coderholic/django-cities

doesn't include city names, but here is a python script that pulls up-to-date country names, codes, currencies, etc from standards bodies: https://github.com/ewheeler/current-countries-of-earth

How hard would it be to generate that kind of data from Wikipedia ?

Shouldn't there be location info for each city? A long/lat field?

quite incomplete. why not ask github users to fork, contribute as fixtures & send pull request

Nice - much needed!