Yes thanks indeed and can I be noted as "strongly supporting your plea for consistency in use of the terms" referring to ISO terms (preferably the authoritative terms of course!) On 02/04/2015 2:38 am, "Annebeth Lange" <annebeth.lange@uninett.no> wrote:
Thank you, Jaap. Very useful.
Annebeth B Lange Head of Legal and Policy UNINETT Norid AS
Den 1. apr. 2015 kl. 14.44 skrev Jaap Akkerhuis <jaap@nlnetlabs.nl>:
All,
In the last call I pleaded for consistency of terms, when referring to ISO subjects. As I have noticed over time (and not only our group but all over the ICANN community) there is a tendency use informal terminology and definitions in various discussions. That does sometimes causes confusions of Babylonian proportions.
I offer here some clarifications in the form of this FAQ. I hope it helps to minimize the confusion in the discussion, and also in the development of the glossary to our current draft.
Regards,
jaap
----
Q: What is the ISO 3166?
A: It is an international standard developed by ISO. ISO 3166 provides universally applicable coded representations of names of countries (current and non-current), dependencies, and other areas of particular geopolitical interest and their subdivisions. The standards consists of three parts, ISO 3166-1 (Part 1: Countries codes), ISO 3166-2 (Part 2: Country subdivisions code), ISO3166-3 (Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries). The edition (version) of is identified by the year of publication. Therefore the full reference to the current (third) Edition of ISO 3166 Part is ISO 3166-1:2013.
The codes only uses the ASCII letters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9) and for ISO 3166-2, hyphens.
Q: What form of codes are defined?
A: ISO3166-1 uses two letter codes alpha-2), three letter codes (alpha-3) and numerical codes, ISO 3166-2 uses codes starting with and ISO 3166 alpha-2 code an hyphen and one or more letters or numbers, while ISO 3166-4 uses 4 letter codes.
The codes can have various classifications such as Assigned (by ISO 3166/MA or User Assigned), Unassigned, Reserved in various ways (Exceptionally, transitional, and Indeterminately). See also < http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_codes_glossary.h...
for details.
The real authoritative source for these terms is of course the Standard itself.
Q: What is the ISO list code list?
A: There just a list. However the term is used colloquially to denote (most of the time) the list with the Country Code Assignments in Section 9 of ISO 3166-1. People tend to use this imprecise, often lumping the Reserved Codes also in the notion of "the ISO 3166 list". At the same token but even more confusing is the use of the term "the ISO 3166-2 list" not meaning part 2 of the standard but the list of the alpha-2 codes from Part one (and then it isn't whether they mean all possible codes, both the Assigned and the Reserved or just the Assigned).
Q: What is the purpose of all these codes anyway?
A: To paraphrase from ISO 3166-1, the codes are intended to be used in any application requiring the expression of current country names in coded form. The term "country names" is defined in definition 3.4 "name of country, dependency, or other area of particular geopolitical interest". That is why often sees the term "Countries and territories" is used as a reminder that it is not just about countries.
Q: What has statistics to do with these codes?
A: The list of countries in Part 1 are based (but not limited to) on the list in the "Standard Country or Area Code for Statistical Use" of the UN.
_______________________________________________ Ctn-crosscom mailing list Ctn-crosscom@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ctn-crosscom
Ctn-crosscom mailing list Ctn-crosscom@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ctn-crosscom