GeoDataSource World Cities Database Free Edition

As its name clearly states, GeoDataSource World Cities Database Free Edition is a lightweight data package that provides you with a comprehensive list of cities (approximately 2.700.000), alongside with their name and region names, in text form.

This is especially useful for GIS or other types of applications that require a city and country code database.

Before anything, please note that you need to first register an account on the developer's website in order to be able to download the Free Edition of the utility.

Even more so, you should know that in order to make the most out of this data package, you are required to work with any database application capable of importing large numbers of records, for instance, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL.

In order to fully understand GeoDataSource World Cities Database Free Edition's list of cities, you need to be aware of the meaning of certain designation codes. For example, PPL stands for populated place and refers to any city, town, village or other bundles of buildings where people live of work.

PPLA comes from seat of first-order administration division, PPLC designates the capital of a political entity, PPLL refers to populated locality, PPLQ to abandoned populated place, PPLR to religious populated place and PPLS to populated places.

PPLW refers to destroyed populated places, PPLX to section of populated place, PPLA2 to second-order administrative division, PPLA3 to third-order administrative division and PPLA4 to forth-order administrative division.

Taking everything into consideration, GeoDataSource World Cities Database Free Edition is a lightweight package that can be easily used for a broad range of GIS projects or other types of applications, just as long as you make sure that a database software is also present on your computer.