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Country and region codes, boundaries

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Antoine Iba Halin edited this page Apr 15, 2021 · 3 revisions

Country codes

In order to easily identify countries and regions of the world, the International Standard Organization has created the ISO 3166-1 standard:

  • ISO 3166-1 alpha-2: 2-letter code for countries. For example, "FR" for France.
  • ISO 3166-1 alpha-3: 3-letter code for countries. For example, "FRA" for France.

This Excel file provides a list of 245 countries with their associate ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes, as well as specific numbers for world regions (eg: Europe), sub-regions (eg. Western Europe), and intermediate_regions for some countries (worksheet: info).

In the "geo" worksheet, one spatial point (latitude, longitude) is associated with each country (key: country name and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code). For example, the point for France is:

  • latitude: 46,2276
  • longitude: 2,2137
  • POINT(2.213749 46.227638)

Country boundaries

GeoBoundaries is a open, free and up-to-date database of political administrative boundaries.

Countries are divided into up to 6 sub-divisions, form ADM0 to ADM5. ADM0 is countries' political borders. ADM1 is the 1st sub-division within the country (French regions, American states, etc.), and so on until the 6th sub-divison (if it exist).

ADM0 files are provided with ISO 3166-1 alpha-3. There's no ISO code for sud-divisions within countries.

The number of sub-division depends on each country adiministrative structuration. Sub-divisions of 2 different countries within the same ADM are not guaranteed to be socio-economically, demographically nor politically equivalent as explain here

Source:

https://data.world/vizwiz/country-region-codes/workspace/file?filename=CountryCodes.xlsx

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