<div dir="ltr">A good official list of countries is available from the Library of Congress:<div> <a href="http://www.loc.gov/standards/codelists/countries.xml">http://www.loc.gov/standards/codelists/countries.xml</a></div>
<div style> For background, see: <a href="http://www.loc.gov/marc/countries/">http://www.loc.gov/marc/countries/</a></div><div style><br></div><div style>And of course there's ISO 3166, the list of country codes:</div>
<div style> <a href="http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_names_and_code_elements_xml.htm">http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_names_and_code_elements_xml.htm</a></div><div style>
<a href="http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes">http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes</a><br></div><div style><br></div><div style>Not sure about the alternate representations and misspellings, though.</div><div style><br>
</div><div style>Matt</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Shorthouse, David <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:davidpshorthouse@gmail.com" target="_blank">davidpshorthouse@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Folks,<br>
<br>
The Canadensys development team, <a href="http://www.canadensys.net" target="_blank">http://www.canadensys.net</a> is looking<br>
for efficient, low-maintenance ways to validate and reconcile data in<br>
its National cache of occurrence data. We are working on a Java<br>
library to initially tackle single-field Darwin Core validations,<br>
<a href="https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor" target="_blank">https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor</a>. We hope this library<br>
is sufficiently generalized for uses outside our project.<br>
<br>
Our current challenge is to reconcile country names, which requires<br>
access to an up-to-date, well-maintained knowledge base of country<br>
names, their alternative representations (possibly multilingual), and<br>
mappings to known misspellings. For performance reasons, we'd like<br>
this thesaurus to be embedded in the library, but with the capacity to<br>
be periodically refreshed with data pulled from external resources<br>
such as <a href="http://dbpedia.org" target="_blank">dbpedia.org</a>. This clearly has ties to semantic web thinking<br>
and, because we're new to the tools and services in this space, we'd<br>
like to solicit pointers and feedback such that we build this part of<br>
our library with maximal benefit to other projects. We started<br>
collecting thoughts here:<br>
<a href="https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14" target="_blank">https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14</a>.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
David P. Shorthouse<br>
Christian Gendreau<br>
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</blockquote></div><br></div>