Source of data for “official” country/region list

Question

Lately we've started getting issues with outdated countries / regions list being presented to users of our web-application.

We currently have a few DB tables to store localized country names along with their regions (states). However as the planet goes, that list is in constant evolution and it's proving to be a pain to maintain as some regions are deleted, some merged - existing data needs to be updated all the time.

What are, if any exist, the best practices when it come to dealing with multi-locale countries/regions list?

Is there a place or a standard in place? I know of ISO 3166, but their list isn't exactly DB friendly ... plus it's not fully localized.

An ideal solution would simply allow us to "sync" to it? Preferably in multiple language. The solution would preferably be free or subscription based with an historic of what changed so we could update our data (aka tblAddress)

Thanks!

Answer 1

This one looks very good: Multiple languages, update option, database independent file format for import, countries/regions/cities information, and some other features you might use or not.

And it's quite affordable if you need it for only one server.

Answer 2

geonames is pretty accurate in this respect, and they update regularly.

http://www.geonames.org/export/

Answer 3

There is no such thing. This is a political issue, which you can only solve in the context of your own application. Deciding to use ISO 3166 could be the easiest to defend. I know of issues with at least:

• China/Taiwan
• Israel/Palestine
• China/Tibet
• Greece/Macedonia

Answer 4

The ISO lists here are DB friendly, though they only include short names and codes.

Answer 5

You can try CLDR

http://cldr.unicode.org/

This set of data is maintained by the Unicode organization. It is updated regularly and the data is versioned so it is easy for you to manage the state of your list.

Answer 6

Well, wait, do you just want an up-to-date list of countries? Or do you need to know that Country X has split into Country Y and Country Z? Because I'm not aware of any automated way to get the latter. Even updates to the ISO databases are distributed as PDFs (you're on your own for implementing the change)

Answer 7

The EU maintains data about Local Administrative Units (LAUs) which can be downloaded as hierarchical XLS files in several languages.

Answer 8

Hy! you can find a free dump of all countries with their respective continents https://gist.github.com/kamermans/1441495, its much easy to use.just download the dump & upload in your data base.