Welcome to the Open World Database open source project. Have you ever worked on a project and needed geographical data for say, all of the African countries, regions and sub-regions? I am sure we as developers have all been there and it can be a real pain. It often takes someone going of and filling database tables with this data manually, souring the data from somewhere such as Wikipedia. What if you also needed the geolocation (GPS) information for these same locations? That would make the job much harder.
With the Open World Database project the aim is to bring together contributors from both the developer and general community to build an open and accessible database of countries, regions, sub-regions, cities, towns and so forth that will benefit everyone. Everyone is free to contribute in anyway they can and developers can join the Wiki and start adding your ideas for tools and services that can be built around this information. In the end, the sky is the limit and there is no reason not to get involved because, by joining and contributing, you are helping others by helping yourself. More will be posted here as the project gets under way, in the mean time, please join the wiki, of course OpenID is supported, and follow the project on Twitter. Looking forward to reading about how everyone see this project evolving.