A URI that identifies the location.

GeoNames.org provides stable, widely recognized identifiers for more than 10 million geographical names that can be used as links to further information. For example, http://sws.geonames.org/593116/ identifies the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. Unfortunately these URIs cannot easily be automatically deduced since the URI scheme uses simple numeric codes. Finding a GeoNames identifier for a Location is almost always a manual process. Where such identifiers are known or can be found, however, it is recommended that they be used.

The use of a URIs has added advantages:

1.it can be used by automated systems to look up additional data (linked data);

2. a triple store may store only one copy of the URI, whereas if a string is used, a copy of that string is always stored for each and every person in the database. Thus, in large data sets, the saving on memory capacity and the improvement in transmission efficiency can be substantial.

http://sws.geonames.org/593116/