Giving names to places and using them for reference is a pervasive characteristic of human society. Thus, placenames come from innumerable sources around the world and are forever being created for new purposes or rediscovered from historical documents and artifacts. There are numerous sources of data about named places available for building new gazetteers and adding to existing gazetteers.

Toponymic authorities, such as the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and the Geographical Names Board of Canada, are primary sources of gazetteer data. They are tasked with standardizing placenames for governmental purposes, from the country/nation level to local government councils. They use sets of rules to standardize the form of official names and to exclude some names that would be offensive or otherwise unacceptable (e.g., Orth and Payne 2003). Formal toponymic authorities focus on placenames and generally use point locations for footprints, which are sufficient to disambiguate one feature from another. They also use typing schemes that make sense for their operations.

The two publicly available gazetteers maintained by the U.S. government under the aegis of the BGN are rich sources of gazetteer data. They are particularly valuable sources of placenames and the point locations giving the general locations of the features. Both of the U.S. federal gazetteers are searchable through online user interfaces and both make it easy to download sets of their data for local use. The USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) gazetteer is the official repository for domestic placename information. It obtains...