Relate country to region?

[Jim Croft]

>One suggestion is the "World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant
>Distributions" Edition 2, by R.K. Brummitt. It is an endorsed standard of
>the Taxonomic Database Working Group.
>A pdf of the publication, as well as text delimited files and MS Access
>database of the standard are available here: http://www.tdwg.org/geo2.htm

This data set is hierarchical and arbitrarily 4 levels deep (approximating
areas for continents, regions, countries (or aggregations or parts of
countries), and states or provinces).

Where appropriate it lists the corresponding 2-letter ISO country code, and
is a relatively painless way to get hold of this dataset.

The following on-line gazetteers have hierarchical regional arrangements of
sorts and might be suitable:

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic names:
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn/index.html

Alexandra Digital Library Gazetteer:
http://fat-albert.alexandria.ucsb.edu:8827/gazetteer/

Geonet Names Server (GNS):
http://www.nima.mil/gns/html/index.html

A useful list of on-line gazetteers and place name servers can be found at:
http://www.asu.edu/lib/hayden/govdocs/maps/geogname.htm

jim


~ Jim Croft ~ jrc at anbg.gov.au ~ 02-62465500 ~ www.anbg.gov.au/jrc/ ~