Relate country to region?

[John Irish]

The United Nations "Macro Regions"
(http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/maplib/worldregions.htm) is a three-tier
continent/region/country hierarchy that works well for me. The regions
have very little biological basis, but then, neither do countries.

Una Smith wrote:
>
> The HIV sequence database (http://hiv-web.lanl.gov) includes
> the country where each sequence was sampled.  For mapping
> and statistical analysis, we need to relate countries to the
> larger geographic regions where they occur.  We use the ISO
> country codes, so it would be ideal to use relational tables
> that define the same set of countries.
>
> Curators of most international collections have dealt with
> this problem already.  What standard tables are available and/
> or what do you use?
>
> Thanks,
>
>         Una Smith
>
> Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS K-710, Los Alamos, NM  87545

--
Dr. John Irish
Biosystematics Coordinator: Namibia
Tel./SMS: +264-81-269-6602; Fax +264-61-258153
P.O. Box 21148, Windhoek

"The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits
to grow sharper - E. Phillpots"