How to Anonymise Places in Python

In this article I illustrate how to identify and anonymise places in Python, without the usage of NLP techniques, such as Named Entity Recognition. Places identification is based on a gazetteer, which is built from the Geonames Database. Geonames is a Web service, containing (almost) all the places in the world. The Geonames database can be downloaded for free at at this link. The idea behind this article is to build a gazetteer from the Geonames Database and exploit it to recognise places in a sentence.