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