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Subject: RE: [emergency] EDXL - political subdivisions


Art,
ISO 3166-1 uses the term <country> to specify the nation. I suggest we keep the <country> designation;

ISO 3166-2 uses the term <subdivision> to describe a known geographic area (i.e.; province, county, township, etc.) so your suggested change for using  <primaryDivision> and <secondaryDivision> are consistent with international standards. I support your suggestion as the term <jurisdiction> will produce pushback from the DOJ community.

The combination of ISO 3166-1, -2, and UN/LOCODE appear to mitigate the "subdivison" contention issue:

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/04background-on-iso-3166/iso3166-2.html
Sample entry from ISO 3166-2
Here you see the entry for Canada from ISO 3166-2. The abbreviations used in the headers of the entries are explained in an annex to ISO 3166-2.

CA   CANADA
10 provinces      	province (fr)
3 territories        	territoire (fr)
List source:   Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB), 1997-03-18; IGN 1989; Canadian Postal Guide; E-mail on Nunavut from Standards Council of Canada (SCC), 1999-09-02; update 2001; update 2002
Code source:   Canadian Postal Guide  

Provinces:        
   	(en)  				(fr)  
CA-AB  Alberta     
CA-BC  British Columbia  		Colombie-Britannique  
CA-MB  Manitoba     
CA-NB  New Brunswick  			Nouveau-Brunswick  
CA-NL  Newfoundland and Labrador  	Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador 
CA-NS  Nova Scotia  			Nouvelle-Écosse  
CA-ON  Ontario     
CA-PE  Prince Edward Island  		Île-du-Prince-Édouard  
CA-QC  Quebec  				Québec  
CA-SK  Saskatchewan     
         
Territories:        
CA-NT  Northwest Territories  	Territoires du Nord-Ouest  
CA-NU  Nunavut     
CA-YT  Yukon Territory  		Territoire du Yukon  

Relationship with other coding systems
The subdivision standard provides an important link between ISO 3166-1 and UN/LOCODE, the United Nations Code for Ports and other Locations, developed and maintained by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE).

Whereas ISO 3166-1 codes country names, UN/LOCODE provides code elements for more than 32 000 names of ports, airports, rail and road terminals, postal exchange offices, border crossing points and other locations used in trade and transport. All code elements in UN/LOCODE start with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code element for the country in which the place concerned is located. In some countries there are several places with the same name. In such cases the relevant ISO 3166-2 subdivision code is essential to distinguish between them.

All three code systems taken together enable users to consistently code geographical information all the way down from the country level, over the subdivision level to the level of single locations used in trade and transport (see the short list below).

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code:  DE  (Germany)

ISO 3166-2 subdivision code:  DE-BW  (Federal state of Baden-Württemberg)

UN/LOCODE location code:   DESTR   (City of Stuttgart)


Regards,
 
Tom Merkle
 
CapWIN:        www.capwin.org 
Phone:        (301) 614-3720
Cell Phone:   (240) 375-1966
Fax:          (301) 614-0581
e-mail:        tmerkle@capwin.org
 
CapWIN
6305 Ivy Lane Suite 300
Capital Office Park
Greenbelt, MD 20770

-----Original Message-----
From: Art Botterell [mailto:acb@incident.com] 
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2005 9:14 PM
To: emergency@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [emergency] EDXL - political subdivisions

Regarding our proposed <targetArea> tags for political subdivisions in the EDXL Distribution Element, on further thought I'd like to suggest we make the following changes:

	Rename <country> as <nation>;

	rename <primaryJurisdiction> as <primaryDivision>; and,

	rename <secondaryJurisdiction> as <secondaryDivision>.

Also, I think maybe we may need to ensure that each subdivision is clearly bound to one and only one higher-level political boundary. 
(E.g., "Hamilton" might be a secondaryDivision in both Ohio and
Ontario.)  So maybe these need to be structured as nested elements instead of peers.

And of course I think we want to remember in the data dictionary to depreciate the use of political area names in favor of explicit geospatial representations (circles and polygons).  We don't want to encourage the construction of string-matching applications, even though we may have to accomodate them for the time being.

- Art

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