www.geonames.org is a service where you can query for global geographic data such as administrative areas, populated places, weather data etc.
Details
The functions in this package are mostly thin wrappers to the API calls documented at the geonames web services overview http://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html.
A set of example calls are supplied in a file with the package. Once
you have set your geonames username with
options(geonamesUsername="myusernamehere") you can run
this with source(system.file("tests","testing.R",package="geonames"),echo=TRUE)