geo name database (city, points of interest)

I am building a travel website with django. When a user is typing in开发者_运维问答 the destination city name (or points of interest, like yellow stone), I want to do ajax auto suggestion. The question is how I could get the suggestion database? Is there any web service? Best if it could also support foreign cities. Thanks a lot.

What you want is called a gazetteer database.

The official USGS gazetteer for the USA is available for download.

Two global geocoded databases include:

Geonames has a free list of cities and POI. It includes the USGS gazetteer and lots of other info. You might have to subset their database however, as it might return too many results for you.

Maxmind also have a free database of cities.

take a look at OpenStreetMap there are a lot of cities, pois both in chinease and english