Canadian Geographical Names - CGN

The Canadian Geographical Names Data Base (CGNDB) is the authoritative national database of Canada's geographical names. The purpose of the CGNDB is to store place names and their attributes that have been approved by the Geographical Names Board of Canada (GNBC), the national coordinating body responsible for standards and policies on place names. The CGNDB is maintained by Natural Resources Canada, through the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation. The geographic extent of the CGNDB is the Canadian landmass and water bodies; the temporal extent is from 1897 to present. This dataset is extracted from the CGNDB on a weekly basis, and consists of current officially approved names, feature type, coordinates of the feature, decision date, source, and other attributes. The output file formats for this product are: text (CSV), Shape (SHP), and Keyhole Markup Language (KML).

Content advisory: The Canadian Geographical Names Database contains historical terminology that is considered racist, offensive and derogatory. Geographical naming authorities are in the process of addressing many offensive place names, but the work is still ongoing. For more information, please contact the GNBC Secretariat.