# Region / State

Key: `geography.location.region`

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

Page: <https://meridian.online/docs/projects/finetype/types/geography/location/region>

Samples: `California`, `Texas`, `Ontario`, `Bavaria`, `Île-de-France`

## Background

### Origin

Administrative divisions are the geographical areas into which an independent sovereign state is divided.[[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_division) Wikipedia's article on administrative divisions names states, provinces, lands, oblasts and regions among the terms used for a country's largest divisions.[[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_division) 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]](https://github.com/meridian-online/finetype/blob/main/labels/definitions_geography.yaml)

ISO 3166-2 is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization.[[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2) ISO 3166-2 defines codes for identifying the principal subdivisions of the countries coded in ISO 3166-1.[[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2) ISO 3166-2 was first published in 1998.[[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2) 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]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2) 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]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2) Wikipedia records 5,046 codes defined in ISO 3166-2 as of 23 November 2023.[[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2)

### Use

Bavaria's ISO 3166-2 code is DE-BY, listed with the German subdivision name Bayern and the English name Bavaria.[[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:DE) 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]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US)

Eurostat's NUTS classification divides each EU country into three levels of regions for statistical purposes.[[6]](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/overview) 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. [Administrative division - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_division) — secondary source
2. [finetype/labels/definitions\_geography.yaml at main · meridian-online/finetype · GitHub](https://github.com/meridian-online/finetype/blob/main/labels/definitions_geography.yaml) — FineType
3. [ISO 3166-2 - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2) — secondary source
4. [ISO 3166-2:DE - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:DE) — secondary source
5. [ISO 3166-2:US - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US) — secondary source
6. [Overview - NUTS - Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics - Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/overview) — organisation