Names for ADM1

[Erik Bolstad]

Hi all!

 

I’ve tried to find ways to avoid the term  “First order administrative divisions” for ADM1, as I find the term rather confusing.

 

I’d like to use “State” as ADM1 for the US and Germany, “County” as ADM1 in Norway and Sweden”, “Region” for Denmark etc.

 

I’ve had a close look at all ADM1 in Geonames, and the picture of what they are called is rather confusing:

Most countries don’t have just one name for their first order administrative level.

 

I’ll give two examples:

- Norway has counties (fylke) as the primary administrative level, but there are two other territories which are not called county: Svalbard and Jan Mayen. In addition there are three dependencies (“biland” in Norwegian)

- Russia has several terms for their first order administrative divisions: counties (oblasts), republics, territories (krais), autonomous distrivts (okrug) and federal cities.

 

Hence this: To find out what term to use for a first-order administrative division, the term has to be given for each individual division.

 

A Russian example:

RU.AD     Adygeya           republic

RU.AGB    Aga Buryatia      okrug

RU.AL     Altai             republic

RU.ARK    Arkhangelsk       oblast

 

 

Has anyone ever seen a table like this that covers all or most of the ADM1 in Geonames?

Is it something that should be included in Geonames?

Does anyone have any good sources for a table like this?

 

 

Greetings from Norway!

Erik Bolstad

 

 

 

 

---

Erik Bolstad

editor of yr.no

 

yr.no is an online weather service from the

Norwegian Broadcasting Corp and the

Norwegian Meteorological Institute

 

 

 

[Erik Bolstad]

[Erik Bolstad]

[Erik Bolstad]

[Daniel Zeman]

Erik Bolstad napsal(a):
> ...

>
> - Norway has counties (fylke) as the primary administrative level, but
> there are two other territories which are not called county: Svalbard
> and Jan Mayen. In addition there are three dependencies (“biland” in
> Norwegian)
>
> - Russia has several terms for their first order administrative
> divisions: counties (oblasts), republics, territories (krais),
> autonomous distrivts (okrug) and federal cities.
>
> Hence this: To find out what term to use for a first-order
> administrative division, the term has to be given for each individual
> division.
>
> A Russian example:
>
> RU.AD Adygeya republic
>
> RU.AGB Aga Buryatia okrug
>
> RU.AL Altai republic
>
> RU.ARK Arkhangelsk oblast
>
> Has anyone ever seen a table like this that covers all or most of the
> ADM1 in Geonames?
>
> Is it something that should be included in Geonames?
>
> Does anyone have any good sources for a table like this?
>

I would find it interesting to have such a table but I am rather
pessimistic as to whether we can get easily something that would be
accurate. Names of administrative divisions are tricky. They should be
available in the local language(s) (often more than one language).
Translations are often misleading, sometimes arbitrary. For instance, I
do not know about any etymologic relation between Japanese 県 (ken) and
English prefecture. Why is the thing not translated as county, or
region? Probably just for historical reasons - the first European to
provide a translation must have come from a country where prefectures
were used. Similarly, Erik, I do not see any special reason for
translating Russian "oblast" as "county" and "kraj" as "territory". It
could easily be vice versa, and you could also use "province",
"district", "region" etc. (Btw., we also have "kraj" in Czechia and my
dictionary suggests "region" as the translation.) There will be bias
towards a particular translation according to the meaning of
similarly-sounding divisions in a country where the target language is
used. Libya is divided in 34 شعبيات (sha'biyāt) which I was told should
be understood as "communes"; however, hearing that term I tend to expect
rather a group of a few villages and settlements, while the average
division of Libya covers over 50000 km2...

As to the source you seek, most of the information can be found in
Wikipedia. Unfortunately, it is not in one table. You have to look it up
in the respective countries' pages. I have collected some incomplete
table of the various kinds and names of administrative divisions in many
countries; however, I do not have the assignment of particular territory
type to the particular territory names (i.e., the table knows that there
are "respublika", "kraj", "oblast'", "avtonomnaja oblast'" etc. but it
does not know that e.g. "Karelija" is "respublika").

Cheers,
Dan

[RsH]

Then you would also enjoy Nunavut...

4 languages in use and 4 names.

http://www.gov.nu.ca/ and note the 4 languages...

RsH
=======================================================
R. S. (Bob) Heuman <robert...@alumni.monmouth.edu>
Copyright retained. My opinions - no one else's...
If this is illegal where you are, do not read it!

Retention of this message in violation of Canadian
Privacy Laws will be prosecuted.

[Erik Bolstad]

First: Sorry for sending the previous message so many times. Something must be very wrong with my email system...

Daniel wrote:

> I would find it interesting to have such a table but I am rather
> pessimistic as to whether we can get easily something that would be
> accurate. Names of administrative divisions are tricky. They should be
> available in the local language(s) (often more than one language).
> Translations are often misleading, sometimes arbitrary.

I'm not really looking for a list in the local languages: I'm looking for decent, "normal" translations to English. In Japan, the term used should be prefecture (because there's a historical reason for it), for Russia either oblast or county would do - at least it's a lot better than "first order administrative division". I am convinced that we will not be able to make a perfect list, but I am sure we'll be able to make a list which is more understandable to "non-geo-nerds" than the current terms.

On a general basis, I think we focus too much on local languages: In most circumstances, we need complete lists of feature names in one language, and not necessarily the local one. My site is available in the Norwegian languages and English, and I don't really need to know the local translations for administrative divisions. Also: The question of local language is often very politicized, and does often lead to edit wars.

I enclose a spreadsheet with a brief attempt to start a table with English (and Norwegian) feature names. The spreadsheet contains all region codes that were included in Geonames in June.
The spreadsheet also includes my translation of most of the region names, so that Abu Dhabi is displayed in its normal English way, and not as Abū Z̧aby. At some stage, I plan on sending the translations to Marc to have them included in Geonames, I just want to be a bit more sure of them first :-)

Daniel: I'd love to get your incomplete tables - at least it's a good start!

Greetings,
Erik





---------- Opphavleg melding ----------
From: Daniel Zeman <ze...@ufal.mff.cuni.cz>
Date: Oct 6, 9:25 pm
Subject: Names for ADM1
To: GeoNames

Dan- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

[Daniel Zeman]

Erik Bolstad napsal(a):

> Daniel: I'd love to get your incomplete tables - at least it's a good start!
>
>

It is my pleasure to provide it, although you will find another factor
obstructing, apart from the incompleteness: its focus on Czech as the
working language. I just translated the column headers to English but a
big part of the contents is in Czech (actually much more than I thought
yesterday when writing the mail without looking at the table). I think
that most country names and language names are understandable for an
English speaker. I will be happy to help with the rest but I am sorry I
am unable to translate the whole table at this time. The translations to
Czech are probably useless for you (except for things like "provincie"
or "region"), and there are currently no English translations.
Etymologic and other notes are also in Czech...

Well, at least there are the local names, which, unlike you, I find
highly interesting. I tried to include all languages that are used in
the given area and that I was able to figure out. No political criteria
whether something can be included or not! One technical note you should
bear in mind: if there are more than one name for a kind of division
(i.e. in more than one language), each of them is on a different line.
In that case they have the same country, type and level. The "types" are
short alphabetic codes just to distinguish phenomena you mentioned: a
federal district vs. a state etc.

Finally, as a bonus, I am attaching a correction of your table for
Czechia. (Actually, this should be corrected in Geonames as well but I
am not sure whether I have the right to remove objects, so Marc might be
interested in this.) There is a number of non-existing entities (I
recognize some names of towns that used to be seats of second order
divisions but this level has been cancelled anyway.) Czechia is divided
in 14 entities: 13 krajs (sg. "kraj", pl-nom "kraje", pl-gen (with
numbers) "krajů"), and the territory of the capital. Also, the correct
spelling requires that "kraj" is NOT written with uppercased first
letter, unless it appears in the beginning of the name (which is only in
"Kraj Vysočina"). As to the English translation of "kraj", "region"
seems to be the usual solution.

Best,
Dan

[Haytham el-fadeel]

Hi all,

Good work guy, I also think that we should have a field that determine the kind of the administrative divisions (Sate, province, etc) and the Name in English letters (like Abu Dhabi, not Abū Z̧aby) in the name field. The others languages or write style will be in Alternate names field.

I like this conversation, but what about we this. We first should collect the possible administrative divisions kind and generate a two letter code for example and then we can distribution tasks to get the right English spelling for first order administrative divisions. Then we can change the geonames table to be like this.

...,Name, Divison Type, Alternate name,...
Altai Krai, federal, Алта́йский край, Altaysky kray, federal Altai krai
Cairo, province, Mohafazet Al-Qahera, القاهرة, Cairo province

The name will content only the first-order admin divion name without any title.
Division Type field will allow us to have for the same country many ways for divisions (For example Russia have 46 oblasts, and 21 republics)
Alternate name is the old Alternate name without changes

About me I will start to create a xls file that content first-order administrative divisions for Egypt and many other Middle East countrys.

Guys what about this ;)

   

---

Regards,

Haytham El-fadeel

---

> Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2008 22:56:03 +0200
> From: ze...@ufal.mff.cuni.cz
> To: geon...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: [GeoNames] Re: Names for ADM1

[Erik Bolstad]

This is a really useful conversation! Thanks!

I REALLY want to avoid working in Excel - it tends to get really
clogged up, with versionating problems etc.

I've uploaded my Excel sheet to Google Docs, to avoid problems with
sending emails back and forth.

Anyone are welcome to contribute to filling out the blanks!
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p9qC723R2nTS3t1uO6GClKw

Some notes: Please only edit the "Feature name English"-coloumn. Other
changes will be discarded.
Sorry for leaving the "Feature name Norwegian". It's really useful to
me, so I'd like to leave it. Feel free to add other coloums (one for
each language please).

I'll go through Dan's list and add some of his information. My
knowledge of Czech is not great, but I can make sens of most of the
words, and have an excellent dictionary :-)

Marc (if you read this): Is there a way we could include this in
Geonames? I am not sure how this can be handled datawise - it's a
rather fussy material...

Greetings,
Erik

>  countries_admin_divs.xls
> 145KViewDownload
>
>  geonamesregion-correction-czechia.xls
> 42KViewDownload

[Daniel Zeman]

> On Oct 7, 10:56 pm, Daniel Zeman <ze...@ufal.mff.cuni.cz> wrote:
>

>> ...

>> Finally, as a bonus, I am attaching a correction of your table for
>> Czechia. (Actually, this should be corrected in Geonames as well but I
>> am not sure whether I have the right to remove objects, so Marc might be
>> interested in this.) There is a number of non-existing entities (I
>> recognize some names of towns that used to be seats of second order
>> divisions but this level has been cancelled anyway.) Czechia is divided
>> in 14 entities: 13 krajs (sg. "kraj", pl-nom "kraje", pl-gen (with
>> numbers) "krajů"), and the territory of the capital. Also, the correct
>> spelling requires that "kraj" is NOT written with uppercased first
>> letter, unless it appears in the beginning of the name (which is only in
>> "Kraj Vysočina"). As to the English translation of "kraj", "region"
>> seems to be the usual solution.
>>
>>

I visited the web interface to correct the Czech errors I mentioned
earlier. I committed minor spelling corrections for a number of krajs
but I was unable to find those spurious entities (named "(EZ21)" and the
like). I think I may have complained about them to Marc a long time ago
- rather years than months. Maybe they are long time gone; however, this
would mean that Erik's database dump is rather old. Would that be possible?

Dan

[Marc Wick]

Hi Erik

> Marc (if you read this): Is there a way we could include this in
> Geonames? I am not sure how this can be handled datawise - it's a
> rather fussy material...

We could certainly add it to the download directory and we can also use
if for the web services and the website.

Best

Marc

[Haytham el-fadeel]

Nice Erik, but I can't edit, I don't have a permission,
Can please give the permission to edit it. (ifx...@gmail.com)

Thank you.

---

Regards,

Haytham El-fadeel

---

> Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 09:53:58 -0700

> Subject: [GeoNames] Re: Names for ADM1

> From: eri...@gmail.com
> To: geon...@googlegroups.com
> CC: erik.b...@nrk.no

[Erik Bolstad]

My database dump is from June 2008, but it also contains old regions
that are still in use in Geonames (some places have not been updated
with new ADM1 codes).

Dan: You have to commit the errors in Czechia in the regular Geonames
interface, or maybe Marc could help you.

Erik

[chaoley]

Nice work Eric

Can I also have permission (cha...@gmail.com) to make some edits, I
see a lot of countries in South East Asia which need English names for
their ADM1s

Regards
John

On Oct 9, 2:53 am, Erik Bolstad <erik...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a really useful conversation! Thanks!
>
> I REALLY want to avoid working in Excel - it tends to get really
> clogged up, with versionating problems etc.
>
> I've uploaded my Excel sheet to Google Docs, to avoid problems with
> sending emails back and forth.
>

> Anyone are welcome to contribute to filling out the blanks!http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p9qC723R2nTS3t1uO6GClKw

> > 42KViewDownload- Hide quoted text -

[Daniel Zeman]

Marc: is there a way to batch-update all Czech names that reference
wrong (should-be-deleted) Czech ADM1 names? I should be able to provide
simple mapping from the wrong ADM1s to the correct ones. However, there
might be hundreds of names referencing the ADM1s. I do not know how to
find them all and I do not want to go through the web interface and
change each of them manually.

Dan

Erik Bolstad napsal(a):

--
RNDr. Daniel Zeman, Ph.D.
ÚFAL MFF, Univerzita Karlova, Praha
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~zeman/

[Marc Wick]

Dan

Are there any rules how the deleted adms map to the new adms? If yes it
would be easy to batch update it. If you have a csv file of corrections
you can send it to me and I run it as a batch job.

Best

Marc

[Daniel Zeman]

Marc

Yes, there are rules, provided my hypothesis about the origin of these
adms is correct. (There is slight uncertainty because the deleted adms
lack "normal" names. But at least the corresponding "English" column in
Erik's file links them to Czech cities (and real past counties).
Following that column, I can assign a new adm1 for each of them - the
old counties were smaller but their borders do not cross the borders of
the new regions.)

The rules follow. I took all Codes, Geonameids and Names from the file
posted by Erik.
code.old;name.old;code.new;geonameid.new;name.new

CZ.20;(EZ20);CZ.82;3339540;Královéhradecký kraj
CZ.21;(EZ21);CZ.83;3339541;Liberecký kraj
CZ.23;(EZ23);CZ.82;3339540;Královéhradecký kraj
CZ.24;(EZ24);CZ.80;3339538;Kraj Vysočina
CZ.30;(EZ30);CZ.88;3339576;Středočeský kraj
CZ.33;(EZ33);CZ.83;3339541;Liberecký kraj
CZ.36;(EZ36);CZ.88;3339576;Středočeský kraj
CZ.37;(EZ37);CZ.88;3339576;Středočeský kraj
CZ.39;(EZ39);CZ.82;3339540;Královéhradecký kraj
CZ.41;(EZ41);CZ.88;3339576;Středočeský kraj
CZ.45;(EZ45);CZ.86;3339574;Pardubický kraj
CZ.61;(EZ61);CZ.83;3339541;Liberecký kraj
CZ.70;(EZ70);CZ.82;3339540;Královéhradecký kraj

Let me know if this form is not sufficient.
Best,
Dan

Marc Wick napsal(a):

[Daniel Zeman]

Same for me (danze...@gmail.com).
Dan

Haytham el-fadeel napsal(a):

>
>
> Nice Erik, but I can't edit, I don't have a permission,

> Can please give the permission to edit it. (*ifx...@gmail.com*)
>
> Thank you.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Regards,
>
> Haytham El-fadeel
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Marc Wick]

Thanks, Dan. The update will be in tomorrows dump.

[Erik Bolstad]

I went through the list and noticed a lot of old data for Finland.

Finland changed their ADM1-level in 1997, by merging a lot of the
provinces into the six current provinces.

FI.03 Central Finland > FI.15 Western Finland
FI.04 Kuopio > FI.14 Eastern Finland
FI.05 Kymi > FI.13 Southern Finland
FI.07 Mikkeli > FI.14 Eastern Finland
FI.09 North Karelia > FI.14 Eastern Finland
FI.10 Turku ja Pori > FI.15 Western Finland
FI.11 Uusimaa > FI.13 Southern Finland
FI.12 Vaasa > FI.15 Western Finland

Marc: Is it possible to batch update this information?

Erik

[Erik Bolstad]

I've also looked through the Russian ADM1 now, and the following
changes need to be done:

RU.14 Chitinskaya Oblast and
RU.02 Aginskiy Buryatskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug
have merged to a new krai (not in Geonames yet):
Zabaykalsky Krai

RU.82 Ust'-Ordynskiy Buryatskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug
has been merged with RU.20 Irkutsk

RU.26 Kamchatskaya Oblast' and
RU.36 Koryakskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug
have merged to a new krai (not in Geonames yet):
Kamchatka Krai

RU.18 Evenkiyskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug and
RU.74 Taymyrskiy (Dolgano-Nenetskiy) Avtonomnyy Okrug
has been merged with RU.39 Krasnoyarskiy Kray

RU.35 Komi-Permyatskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug and
RU.58 Permskaya Oblast'
have been merged to a new krai (not in Geonames yet):
Perm Krai

Erik

[Marc Wick]

Hi Erik

Thanks. I have updated the admin1codes.

Marc

PS: The geonames google group has disappeared for some days. It it back
again. I don't know why it disappeared now why it reappeared.