[Rockhounds] seeking info on official political locality data

[DonH]

J Bryan Kramer wrote:

> This might be a good starting point:
> 
> <http://geonames.usgs.gov/index.html>
> 

Thanks guys for all the answers.  This helps a lot.  Somewhere I thought 
there was a breakdown of administrative divisons by order... in other 
words, a U.S. state is a "1st order division" (i.e., one level down from 
"country") and I'd imagine a German state is the same; but I'm not sure 
whether a Swiss canton or a Japanese praefecture is 1st or 2nd, etc.

The reason this matters is that I need to provide a database that 
catalogs all my samples (and this will be much simpler than the 
collection management database that Tommy and I developed a few years 
ago) and I am striving to keep the locality fields in line with standard 
nomenclature.

Thanks,
Don