country name controlled vocabulary

17 views
Skip to first unread message

David Hays

unread,
May 12, 2025, 6:39:00 PMMay 12
to ror-...@ror.org
We are using the ROR API v2 to retrieve ROR records.  We've noticed that there are several cases where the locations.geonames_details.country_name does not match the name of the country in our CV.  So we thought we'd align with the country name CV that ROR uses...

https://ror.readme.io/docs/api-filtering#filter-by-country-name This indicates that ROR usage of country names follows the ISO 3166 alpha-2 list.  But a number of country_name values used in ROR records do not match this list.

Both our CV and the ROR records refer to "United States" whereas the ISO 3166 alpha-2 list has "United States of America"

Our CV and the ISO list refer to "Russian Federation' but ROR records use "Russia"

Our CV has "Netherlands" but ISO says the current name is "Netherlands, Kingdom of the" with a note that the previous ISO value was "Netherlands".  ROR records refer to "The Netherlands"

What CV for country names does ROR / GeoNames actually use?

Thank you,
David

Adam Buttrick

unread,
May 12, 2025, 7:23:34 PMMay 12
to David Hays, ror-...@ror.org
Hi David,

All location data in ROR is derived from the corresponding Geonames ID/record, including the full country names. The list of all Geonames country names is available here:

https://www.geonames.org/countries/

I see the same divergences from the ISO 3166, so we will have to inquire of them about their ultimate derivation and update our documentation to reflect this discrepancy. We're unlikely to decouple from Geonames any time soon, so this Geonames list of country names will be the best near-term source of reference for what is in use.

Thanks,
Adam

--
To email the members of this group, email ror-...@ror.org.
ROR Code of Conduct: https://ror.org/community/code-of-conduct/
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ROR Technical Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ror-tech+u...@ror.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/ror.org/d/msgid/ror-tech/CA%2BNQthm-0MrD%2BFHKGXxOdWq5-%2BiTW6pVpKgo9heD%2ByfD_%2BA8cQ%40mail.gmail.com.


--
Adam Buttrick
Product Manager, ROR
ad...@ror.org | https://ror.org | @ResearchOrgs

Amanda French

unread,
May 13, 2025, 7:44:31 AMMay 13
to ROR Technical Forum, Adam Buttrick, ror-...@ror.org, deh...@lbl.gov
Hi David,

Sorry for the error in the documentation! Have updated that page. https://ror.readme.io/docs/api-filtering#filter-by-country-name Have checked the field definitions as well on https://ror.readme.io/docs/fields and that page has the correct source for the country names.

Thanks for the correction.

Cheers,

Amanda
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages