This may be a usage issue not a definition issue. For example if you search for the form of notarized signature in u.s. states, you will probably conclude that most or all states require a form County of _______________. In turn this and its sisters may be derived from the Uniform Commercial Code. But other legal docs may have different conventions. One could wish that a best practice would be to follow local practice for legal names of such named entities as counties. But my guess is that in the U.S. this is full of huge state to state variation arising from historical events, especially colonial ones.
Bob

On Apr 12, 2015 10:35 AM, "Steve Baskauf" <steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:

The definition of dwc:county is: "The full, unabbreviated name of the
next smaller administrative region than stateProvince (county, shire,
department, etc.) in which the Location occurs." What I'm wondering
about is whether the "full" name includes the second part to the name as
it's typically written in the U.S. and Canada. "Missoula" is given as
an example. However, the full name of that county in Montana is
actually "Missoula County". If there were consistency in second parts
of county names, one could just assume that one adds " County" after the
value given for dwc:county. However, there isn't consistency. In
Louisiana, it's "Washington Parish". In Alaska, names usually end with
"Borough" (e.g. "Denali Borough"), although sometimes they don't (e.g.
"Dillingham Census Area"). Outside the U.S. and Canada, there may be no
second part to the name, or it might be something completely different.

I am having a problem with this when I try to display values of
dwc:county on a web page. Currently I have some rules that involve
examining the country and the value of dwc:stateProvince to decide what
to append after the first part of the name. But they don't work for
Alaska and if I just said "Dillingham, Alaska" that would really be
wrong if I meant the Dillingham Census Area and not the city of
Dillingham. It would be easier to display them if the second part of
the name were included in the value.

Is there a convention on this? I was assuming that it would be to omit
the second part of the name, but since the definition says "full,
unabbreviated name", I'm not sure.

Steve

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Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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