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_e... 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 _______________________________________________ tdwg mailing list tdwg@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg