Fixed facts.
A connected experience.
The directory holds a reviewed geographic reference. The main Commercial Diplomacy Index links you here when you want to learn about a place. The data stay separate from the page design, so changing a layout does not require uploading the world again.
Understand a place before you plan a connection.
The Places & Business Directory is the geographic and historical business reference companion to Commercial Diplomacy Index. Find cities and settlements, explore country context and published business references, then return to the main index to compare markets and investigate community or city partnerships. Read the directory research guide in text format for a concise map of the sources and reader pages.
What is in this release?
5,232,099 GeoNames populated-place records across 248 observed source country codes. The complete feature-class P extract is retained, with no top-city, population, or country shortlist. It includes villages, city sections, and historic or abandoned places as labeled in the source. It is not an inventory of every geographic feature or municipal government.
The source snapshot was retrieved October 20, 2026. Population is the source field; no separate population observation year is supplied. Zero means zero in the source and needs checking. Languages come from countryInfo and describe country context.
A read-only reference API.
These versioned facts can support connected pages and future tools. The current Site access settings apply to the API too. No API key or service credential is exposed in the pages.
Release: geonames-2026-10-20-v1
GET /api/reference/status — release, verification, coverage, and source.
GET /downloads/geonames-city-manifest.json — country, language, region, and search metadata.
GET /api/v1/search?q=San Antonio, Texas — name search, optional country filter, and paginated results.
GET /api/v1/places/{geonameid} — one place as JSON.
GET /geo/search/{bucket}.ndjson.gz — a name-search shard.
All 2,165 place assets and the metadata file are verified against pinned SHA-256 digests before a release is marked ready. Routine presentation releases reuse those stored objects. A future source refresh will receive a new release identifier.
How the two websites fit together.
Use the directory to identify a place. Use the Index to examine an opportunity. Country pages link back to market profiles and travel histories. Place pages can send a public research reference to My Diplomacy Notebook; your private notes remain on the main site in your browser.
Each site has its own canonical pages and XML sitemap. Country directory pages are included here. Individual place pages render source facts when opened; the sitemap does not create millions of empty or duplicate listing pages.
The 2026 historical business reference.
Use a recorded footprint to imagine what to explore. The Foursquare Open Source Places collection contains 109,255,094 source records. Small country summaries now sit beside the geographic reference, with eight stored measures for 248 geographies. The NDS source build is dated August 18, 2026. Records may describe places from earlier years; this is a historical reference collected in 2026.
A source status called current candidate means that a record was outside the source’s closed and quality-review groups at that snapshot. On the reader pages it is called retained for exploration. Analysis eligible adds valid coordinates and a category. Neither status verifies that a business is open today. The website preserves the original fields in JSON and CSV downloads.
The two count measures retain positions across 248 geographies. Six percentage measures retain the source’s comparison group of 237; the other 11 values remain visible without a share rank. Ties and stored positions are unchanged. Website, category, and coordinate shares describe source coverage. Review and closure shares describe stored record status. They are not measures of business success or annual closure rates.
See the full source coverage accounting
The matched country summaries retain 109,227,356 records. Another 102 records use source codes outside that country comparison group: HM (43), AN (33), BV (13), XX (12), PZ (1). A further 27,636 records have no source country code. Those counts remain in the release coverage rather than being assigned to another geography.
Country display names come from the supplied exact ISO2-to-ISO3 bridge. Kosovo’s display name uses the existing GeoNames countryInfo record for source code XK; the release does not invent an ISO3 mapping for it.
The package contains five passing country-publication checks and five passing geography-reconciliation checks. These are the source’s recorded validations. The new enrichment does not change Commercial Diplomacy Index scores or create an overall business ranking.
Compare the complete country reference · Download the versioned summary release (JSON) · Download all 1,984 measure records (CSV).
Travel beyond one destination.
The supplied international-tourist-departures file adds 2,425 observations for 130 countries and territories, spanning 1995–2024. Only 48 have an observation for 2024. Each country page shows its own available years, without filling gaps. These are departures to destinations worldwide, not unique people or arrivals in the United States. Use the Index’s separate U.S. arrival histories for questions about travel to the United States.
Connect industries with care.
Use the same industry language when comparing markets. The supplied NDS Global Industry Classification Authority V1.0.2 records 3,213 industry mapping edges and 2,542 classification codes. ISIC Revision 4 is its translation hub, with links to NAICS 2022, NACE 2.1, and the ISIC Revision 5 successor. Its 6,426 directional rows include forward and reverse views of the same edges.
Many industries map to more than one code. Keep those links when researching suppliers or potential customers, and avoid adding the same business twice. These classification links organize evidence; they do not supply demand or sales figures. Read the connected industry guide.
A small summary API.
GET /api/v1/country-context — country summaries, stored ranks, coverage, and available outbound travel histories.
GET /api/v1/country-context/us — one country’s source records and definitions. Replace us with its two-letter source code.
GET /api/v1/country-context?format=csv — every stored measure, including the source rank and denominator.
Release: nds-country-reference-2026-v1. Existing Site access settings apply. The large place databases remain separate.
Business identity → operational ZIP → local offer.
The U.S. commercial path starts with the business record and its postal ZIP. The NDS ZIP/ZCTA Geography Stack Operating Guide names NDS_ZIP_MASTER_US.parquet as the first-choice geography spine for business and establishment directories. A valid five-digit business ZIP is matched to that master. Census evidence is attached only through the governed ZIP–ZCTA bridge; postal ZIPs and Census ZCTAs stay distinct.
The business publication retains the source establishment identifier, name, address, category, recorded website, and reference year. A stable page ID keeps the business URL separate from display-name changes. Country and ZIP pages link to categories, and categories link to named business pages through normal page links and paginated results.
Explore ZIP business markets · Ask about a ZIP sponsorship or advertisement. Sponsored placements have their own labeled space and do not change source facts or index scores. Business URLs enter the sitemap only when their source records are published.
The next layer: individual places.
Individual businesses, cultural attractions, and city or metro category profiles will come from a targeted publication of the historical place source. This country summary release gives you a useful first view without putting the full world database into the website deployment.
Source: GeoNames, licensed CC BY 4.0. Read the connected Index coverage notes.
Connect transport.
Connect communities.
Country pages now pair their place stories with airport locations, recorded port links, and shared U.S. community evidence. Use the transport section to plan the journey, and the community table to choose where an introduction might begin.
The airport lookup contributes 9,057 references across 237 country codes, plus 31 records without a country code. The port reference covers 836 codes and 9,995 distinct port pairs across 169 geographies. These describe source coverage, rather than all operating facilities or current routes. Road and rail remain practical route questions where network measures are not supplied.
The shared community preview preserves the existing NDS / Follow Your Heart feed version 1.0.0: 274 community views and 73 exact country-of-birth matches. Full lists, their source definitions, and city research paths open on the main site. The ZIP source is the same master-clean dataset already connected there: 39,487 operational ZIPs, 33,703 direct ZCTA matches, and 5,784 without a direct match.
The uploaded Country Reports database retains country labels but does not provide numeric trade or FDI measures in this copy. No values or rankings are inferred from those labels. Read the three-file source review.