Utilities
The Country authority table is a controlled vocabulary that lists concepts associated with names of countries and territories.
Its main scope is to support documentary metadata activities.
The concepts included are correlated with the ISO 3166 international standard. ISO 3166-1 contains a two-letter code which is recommended as the general purpose code, a three-letter code which has better mnenomic properties and a numeric-3 code which can be useful if script independence of the codes is important. The authority code relies on the ISO 3166-1/alpha-3 positions. If an authority code is needed for a country without assigned ISO code, an alphanumeric code is created in order to not confuse with ISO codes that are strictly alphabetic or numeric.
A country code comparison is provided between ISO codes, IANA codes (Internet Country-code Top-level Domains) and TIR (Transport International par la Route) Vehicle system codes.
The Country authority table is updated based on the stakeholders’ needs.
Contributions to it are accepted following a review made by EU Vocabularies team of the Publications Office of the EU.
The Country authority table is maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union on the EU Vocabularies website.