MeridianMERIDIAN

Region / State

geography.location.region

Subdivision of a country (state, province, region). Locale-specific due to regional name conventions.

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

Administrative divisions are the geographical areas into which an independent sovereign state is divided.[1] Wikipedia's article on administrative divisions names states, provinces, lands, oblasts and regions among the terms used for a country's largest divisions.[1] FineType defines the region type as the subdivision of a country, such as a state, province or region, and marks it locale-specific because of regional name conventions.[2]

ISO 3166-2 is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization.[3] ISO 3166-2 defines codes for identifying the principal subdivisions of the countries coded in ISO 3166-1.[3] ISO 3166-2 was first published in 1998.[3] The stated purpose of ISO 3166-2 is to give short and unique alphanumeric codes that represent administrative divisions more conveniently and less ambiguously than their full names.[3] An ISO 3166-2 code joins a country's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, a hyphen and a string of up to three alphanumeric characters.[3] Wikipedia records 5,046 codes defined in ISO 3166-2 as of 23 November 2023.[3]

Use

Bavaria's ISO 3166-2 code is DE-BY, listed with the German subdivision name Bayern and the English name Bavaria.[4] The same region can arrive spelt in more than one language, so a join on the name alone can miss rows that a join on the subdivision code would match. (Meridian's view)

California's ISO 3166-2 code is US-CA.[5]

Eurostat's NUTS classification divides each EU country into three levels of regions for statistical purposes.[6] A column headed region may hold a state, a statistical region or something smaller, so check which level a source means before comparing it with another file. (Meridian's view) Keep the country beside the region, because a subdivision name is only meaningful within its country. (Meridian's view) Names such as Île-de-France carry accents and hyphens, so compare values after trimming and consistent Unicode normalisation rather than byte for byte. (Meridian's view)

Sources

  1. [1]Administrative division - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]finetype/labels/definitions_geography.yaml at main · meridian-online/finetype · GitHubFineType
  3. [3]ISO 3166-2 - Wikipediasecondary source
  4. [4]ISO 3166-2:DE - Wikipediasecondary source
  5. [5]ISO 3166-2:US - Wikipediasecondary source
  6. [6]Overview - NUTS - Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics - Eurostatorganisation

Detection notes

v1 migration: Was address.subdivision and address.state. Alias covers regional naming conventions. Locale-specific due to regional name representation across languages.

Use it

CLI · DuckDB
$ finetype infer -i "California" --mode column
→ geography.location.region

SELECT ft_infer('California');
-- → 'geography.location.region'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)

Schema

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

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

Aliases

stateprovincesubdivision

Type Registry