MeridianMERIDIAN

Continent Name

geography.location.continent

Name of geographic continent (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, Antarctica). Locale-specific.

Casts to
VARCHAR
Scope
Locale-specific
Locales
EN, EN_AU, EN_GB, EN_CA, EN_US, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, RU, JA, ZH, KO, AR

Background

Origin

A continent is any of several large terrestrial geographical regions.[1] Continents are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria.[1] Because definitions vary, the number of continents counted ranges from as many as seven to as few as four.[1] Most English-speaking countries recognise seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia.[1] The six-continent combined-America model is taught in Greece and many Romance-speaking countries, including in Latin America.[1] The six-continent combined-Eurasia model is mostly used in Russia and some parts of Eastern Europe.[1]

Geographers often use the term Oceania for a region that includes most of the island countries and territories in the Pacific Ocean as well as the continent of Australia.[1] FineType defines the continent type as the name of a geographic continent, validated against seven values: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania and Antarctica.[2] The seven names are a convention rather than a fact of geography, so a column of continents tells you as much about the model its producer chose as about the places in it. (Meridian's view)

Use

The United Nations Statistics Division prepares the M49 standard, Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use.[3] The UN Statistics Division says the assignment of countries or areas to M49 groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation.[3]

GeoNames publishes two-letter continent codes, among them AF for Africa, NA for North America, OC for Oceania and AN for Antarctica.[4] When a continent column holds two-letter codes instead of names, map it through the publisher's code list, and make sure a code such as NA has survived import as text rather than being read as a missing value. (Meridian's view) Settle on one name for the Australian part of the world, whether Australia, Oceania or Australasia, before you group or count. (Meridian's view)

Sources

  1. [1]Continent - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]finetype/labels/definitions_geography.yaml at main · meridian-online/finetype · GitHubFineType
  3. [3]UNSD — Methodologydocumentation
  4. [4]GeoNames export dump readme.txtdocumentation

Detection notes

v1 migration: Was address.continent. Locale-specific for continent name representation. 7-continent model shown in enum.

Use it

CLI · DuckDB
$ finetype infer -i "North America" --mode column
→ geography.location.continent

SELECT ft_infer('North America');
-- → 'geography.location.continent'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)

Schema

https://meridian.online/schemas/geography.location.continent · Frictionless type string

finetype taxonomy geography.location.continent -o json-schema

Type Registry