api VS countries-states-cities-database

It's not that great, but we (OpenTHC) are trying -- https://api.openthc.org/

We make open-source software for the cannabis industry, there are roughly 150 other software providers in this space, and we all need to share data (Lot details, Crop details, Product details, Lab Results, etc). Around 2018 or so we published a OpenAPI specification for data models ( https://github.com/openthc/api ) that we were hoping to get others to participate in. It's been rather difficult.

The previous blocker was that in much of the USA, this data flows through a central system operated by the Government (as a contract to BioTrackTHC, Metrc or Akerna/MJ Freeway/LeafData). So, there hasn't been a critical need for interop. However, recent states to legislate cannabis (Oklahoma, Maine) don't fully have that and one (Washington) is moving away from theirs at the end of the year.

The Washington state one is now, finally, getting some eyeballs to our API model. We'd been inviting these compititors for years to participate but it was crickets. Just recently a trade association stepped up efforts to get some parties to the table. After a few meetings we still haven't been able to even agree to agree. It's frustrating to be asked over and over if we're OK to have others contribute (TF!? we've been asking them for years). And the conversations go in circles:

a) what if we don't get everybody to participate? (we won't)

At $WORK I created a prototype that used https://github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database for a city/state/country typeahead widget - it was generally ok, loaded data into a read-only sqlite db that was created at container build time. We shipped it to AWS for the demo. There are some data bugs, cities in Turkey and Geneva were the top reported issues. You get what you pay for I suppose. Have not seen Geonames before this post but agree the username vs some form of api key/auth is weird.

This looks promising.. https://github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database

Depending on what you need from this package, this might be of help https://github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database

Link

The latter one, though, says that it got its data from countries-states-cities-database, which has some json files with the countries, states and cities. The cities json file is huge. I really don't think that I would ever use all of them, I would only need data from North and South America, at most.