A good official list of countries is available from the Library of Congress:

  http://www.loc.gov/standards/codelists/countries.xml

  For background, see: http://www.loc.gov/marc/countries/

And of course there's ISO 3166, the list of country codes:

  http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_names_and_code_elements_xml.htm

  http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes

Not sure about the alternate representations and misspellings, though.

Matt

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Shorthouse, David <davidpshorthouse@gmail.com> wrote:

Folks,

The Canadensys development team, http://www.canadensys.net is looking
for efficient, low-maintenance ways to validate and reconcile data in
its National cache of occurrence data. We are working on a Java
library to initially tackle single-field Darwin Core validations,
https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor. We hope this library
is sufficiently generalized for uses outside our project.

Our current challenge is to reconcile country names, which requires
access to an up-to-date, well-maintained knowledge base of country
names, their alternative representations (possibly multilingual), and
mappings to known misspellings. For performance reasons, we'd like
this thesaurus to be embedded in the library, but with the capacity to
be periodically refreshed with data pulled from external resources
such as dbpedia.org. This clearly has ties to semantic web thinking
and, because we're new to the tools and services in this space, we'd
like to solicit pointers and feedback such that we build this part of
our library with maximal benefit to other projects. We started
collecting thoughts here:
https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14.

Cheers,

David P. Shorthouse
Christian Gendreau
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