POI Database of European Town Centres?

[rkm_hm]

On TomTom GO's street level maps, there is an option to navigate to a town centre. You simply input the town name again when it asks for street, and it displays the town name along with a little church icon.

TTG also comes with the Major Roads of Europe (MRE) on CD. In fact, it's much more than major roads, and includes a lot of UK-type B roads. BUT, in many cases, the town names are missing - even though the map shows all the roads which intersect at the town. For example, using MRE you would not be able to specify Warminster (in Wiltshire, UK) as a destination even though it shows the A36 and A350 which intersect there.

It seems to me that MRE would be much more useful - and would probably be sufficient for occasional trips to Europe without needing to buy the detailed maps of each country - if only there was a way of navigating to towns.

The town names and their locations (the ones with the little church icons) are clearly embedded somewhere in one of the binary-coded .DAT files which comes with the detailed country maps. Does anyone know how to extract them into a separate POI file which could be used with MRE?

Alternatively, does anyone know of any other source of town name/location data - preferably for UK and all of mainland Europe - suitable of being massaged into a set of POI Town databases?

TIA,
Roger

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