Official names for administrative zones by country available somewhere?

[Lyne Boucher]

I am searching for the official terms of each administrative zones
sections of a country.

Like for example, in Canada :
Adm 1 = Province
Adm 2 = Region

In France :
Adm 1 = Region
Adm 2 = Department

And since all countries not necessary have all 4 zones used, I wanted
to access those names to allow dynamic population of dropdown, using
its "official" label..

Anyone can help on that? Is there a list somewhere? Does geonames have
that somewhere?

TY TY !

[Wolfgang Exler]

For this information you may find help in wikipedia under the country.
Very often these names are listed

Wolfgang

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[Marc Wick]

Hi Lyne

Unfortunately it is not as simple as that. France has been a centralized
country for ages therefore the structure is quite homogeneous. In other
countries like the UK or Germany this was long historical process with
every region and city fighting for more rights and independence. The
result is that you have different types on the same administrative
level. The label therefore needs to be attached to the individual admin
division, not the level.
I am not aware of a structured data source with global coverage
available under an open license.

What we could do to model this is to add a pseudo language code (with
the iso language code as part of the pseudo code to distinguish the
languages) to the alternate name table to make this information editable
via the user interface and include it in the data extract.

Example:
tpen: Province
tpde: Provinz
tpit: Provincia

It would have to be added to all admin divisions explicitly.

Would you be interested in contributing to collecting this information?

Best

Marc

[Lyne Boucher]

Hi Marc and Wolfgang, and thank you for your responses!

I am new to GeoNames, so I didn't realized the amplitude of the task
and its problematics you are mentionning Marc.

I think it would be great to have those labels left of our
dropdownlists, and of course I can look to help gather some datas of
them over the web (like Wolfgang said, ex: Wikipedia)

It really annoys me to make dropdowns, and having left of them labels
written like Admin Zone 1, Admin Zone 2, etc ... I suggest to gather
english and french (I am french language native)

From this point, I look forward your feedback Marc on how we should
process.

Talk to you soon!
Lyne

[Jakub Kotowski]

Hi,

has this gained some traction? It would be really useful to have official native names of administrative areas available. 

I am interested in contributing to collecting this information.

Cheers,

Jakub

[Marc Wick]

Hi Jakub

Erik's spreadsheet is the best data pot to contribute to at the moment:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiZTejiYpxrFcDlxQzcyM1IyblRTM3QxdU82R0NsS3c#gid=0

Best Regards

Marc

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