ISO has introduced codes for England (ENG), Scotland (SCT), Wales (WLS)
and Norther Ireland (NIR) in the 3166-2 standard for country
subdivisions. GeoNames is still listing these entities as PCL and we
would like to change the feature code into ADM1. This will make it
easier to navigate along the administrative hierarchy of places in the
UK. The ADM1 code of a place will indicate whether a place is in
England, Scotland, Wales or Norther Ireland.
Since these subdivisions are not yet known in the fips system we will
use the ISO codes for the four subdivisions.
Here what we want to do :
> change ADM3 to ADM4
> change ADM2 to ADM3
> change ADM1 to ADM2
> change PCL England, Scotland, Wales and Norther Ireland to ADM1
I think this update will make the administrative divisions for the UK a
little bit easier to handle.
Cheers
Marc
I agree this makes sense, and will make the data easier to handle.
To this end I started looking around at the current state, and created this:
http://www.nearby.org.uk/geonames/divisions.php?country=GB
which does rather show the sorry state of UK county classification :(
(built using today's dump file)
I remember the been some work matching up the current ADM1 to the OS
ontology released a while ago? So I guess that is the list of
'counties' (or ADM2) working towards? (and which I support - despite
not linking them, just too many!)
http://www.nearby.org.uk/geonames/matching.php
There was mention of having the Government Office regions as an
intermediate level (pushing counties to ADM3?), which I don't object
to, but it might be an unneeded complication (esp as Wales/Scotland
only have one GOR). If however if doing it would make sense to do it
now... (the OS ontology provides this :)
http://www.nearby.org.uk/geonames/GB-Ontology.php
(I realise this stuff might be known already but its at least helped
me get my head straight around the data geonames does and doesn't
have!)
Barry
--
Barry
I will make this change on Wed 16 January.
We will find another way to keep the information of GOR. We need anyhow
a second mechanism to model dependencies like the dependencies of the
Spanish Islands which are also important but not part of the
administrative division.
Cheers
Marc