Place names

Flow Globe carries its own place database. Nothing is looked up online: names are matched inside the visual, in the report, in a fraction of a second.

What it knows

• 250 countries and territories, by name or by ISO code (two or three letters). Country names are recognised in English, in their French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese forms, and in Japanese, Chinese and Korean script, as well as their official long forms.
• More than 32,000 cities of over 10,000 inhabitants, from GeoNames, and the world's major ports, which can also be written as UN/LOCODE codes such as NLRTM or USLAX. City names are also recognised in Japanese, Chinese and Korean script.
• Common alternative spellings and the usual names of capitals.

Matching ignores case and accents. City-states such as Singapore or Monaco resolve to the city.

A state or province on its own - Texas, Ontario - is not a point the visual knows: it is reported as unrecognised, never placed on a town that happens to share its name. Use it in the country column instead, to tell cities apart. Spreadsheet errors and empty markers such as #N/A, NaN or null count as an empty end.

Places that share a name

When a name belongs to several real places, one is used: a country before a city of the same name, otherwise the most populous. If another of them is large enough to be the one you meant, a notice lists the name and the card marks it Shared name. To choose another:

• put your country column in Origin country or Destination country; or
• write the context into the name: Toledo, Spain, Paris, TX; or
• give the coordinates.

If the country you give contradicts the place found, the visual keeps the place it knows and says it lies outside the given country or region. A two-letter code written after a comma is not flagged when the place is not in it, because the same codes are also provinces in other countries: Hamburg, PA resolves to Hamburg, Germany, without a notice. Written in full - Hamburg, Pennsylvania - or given in the country column, the mismatch is flagged. When in doubt, use the country column or coordinates.

Places it does not find

A name it cannot place - a warehouse code, a village, a misspelling - is listed in a notice, unrecognised places, and counted in Diagnostics. Its flows are not drawn. Use a country, a major city, a port or an ISO code, or give coordinates.

Coordinates

The four latitude and longitude wells place a point exactly, and take priority over the name. Use them for sites, depots or anything below city level.

• Decimal degrees, latitude within ±90 and longitude within ±180.
• (0, 0) is read as a missing value: leave those cells empty instead.
• If the coordinates lie more than 2,000 km from the place the name designates, the place's card warns that latitude and longitude may have been swapped.
• A latitude without its longitude is ignored, and the place is located by name.
• A point given only by coordinates takes the name of the nearest city, when there is one close by. To show your own label, use the display name wells.

Credits

Places: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Country names and codes: world-countries (ODbL). Base map: Natural Earth. The line at the bottom of the visual reads “Places: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Natural Earth · world-countries (ODbL)”; on a very narrow visual it shortens to “GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)”.

The country table embedded in the visual, derived from world-countries, is published under the same licence: the table and its licence notice.