GeoNames Forum

Here is a modified version of your countries files, with a few corrections :
http://www.sirika.com/data/geonames/geonamesCountries.20070407.txt

Corrections :
- French Southern Territories

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terres_australes_et_antarctiques_fran%C3%A7aises
> La monnaie officielle des TAAF est l'euro (et non le franc Pacifique utilisé dans > les collectivités d'outre-mer du Pacifique, bien que la Terre Adélie soit plus
> proche de l'Australie et la Nouvelle Calédonie que de la Réunion) ;
> c'était le franc français avant 1999.

The currency was not set, so it's now set to EUR

Guernsey currency :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey_pound
GPD => GGP

Regards,
Sami Dalouche

Oh, and another correction I added in the file is for Slovenia.

Slovenia doesn't use the Tholar anymore, since they adopted the Euro since 2007.. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovenia)

I also forgot :

Serbia => RSD and not CSD
Serbia and Montenegro => RSD
Montenegro => EUR

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbia_and_Montenegro ,

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/currencycodeslist.html
)

These are also corrected in the file

And yet another correction :

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/currencycodeslist.html
Mozambique's currency is MZN, not MZM.

corrected

Thanks,Sami.

I have applied your modifications. Only with the currency for Guernsey I am not yet sure. "GGP" is not an official ISO code in use. Isn't it better to keep the country code for the British Pound?

Cheers

Marc

You mean "currency code" instead of "country code", right ?

I'm not really sure of the best approach... because saying that guernsay uses GBP is not 100% true since they issue their own notes, and banks seem to consider GGP (and JEP, since jersey is in the same case) as different currencies... But at the same time, entering a non ISO 4217 currency code is kind of awkward and error-prone...

BTW, in the file, it looks like Jersey is associated to "GPD", which doesn't seem to exist.. the british pound is GBP, and Jersey Pound non-official code is JEP..

So, basically, we have 6 countries that are in the same case, and whatever we choose, we must be consistent... So we can :
1] put the official iso code for these 6 territories,
2] set no currency for these countries
3] add the non ISO code as a separate column.

I would tend to think solution 3) would the best, but what do you think ?

----------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217 :
A number of territories are not included in ISO 4217, because their currencies are not per se an independent currency, but a variant of another currency. These currencies are:

1. Faroese króna (1:1 pegged to the Danish krone)
2. Guernsey pound (1:1 pegged to the pound sterling)
3. Jersey pound (1:1 pegged to the pound sterling)
4. Isle of Man pound (1:1 pegged to the pound sterling)
5. Tuvaluan dollar (1:1 pegged to the Australian dollar).
6. Cook Islands dollar (1:1 pegged to the New Zealand dollar).

The following non-ISO codes are, however, sometimes used: "GGP" for the Guernsey pound", "JEP" for the Jersey pound and "IMP" for the Isle of Man pound [1].

Hi Sami

I guess you are right, please feel free to add a new column (how many columns will we have in the end?)
My first impression was that the Guernsey Pound is the same thing as the British Pound. Unfortunately this seems not to be the case and the Guernsey Pound is not accepted in the UK. It is really weird that a small country like Guernsey needs own bank notes, but it is not up to us to judge this.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Sami

I think an additional column will not be easy to understand and the file will need a comment section in any case to describe these issues. What if the comment is sufficient and we don't need an additional column at all? Is there a real value in a new column compared to a comments section?

Cheers

Marc

the advantage I see for the additional column is that it can be automatically processed, whereas the comments need to be processed by someone, etc...

On the other hand, I agree that these columns (equivalentFipsCode and this one) are not generic enough to be there....

An example of where comments can be problematic is for your incremental updates, for instance... for deletions, comments are written in english (duplicate of #..), which means that is is impossible to take any automatic action regarding the deletion. I would tend to think we should not have that kind of stuff everywhere...

So, something different that could be possible would be to prefix the iso codes by something that would describe if it is ISO or not :
iso:GGP
noniso:JEP

What do you think ?

Hi Sami

I have added a comment header to the file countryInfo.txt : http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt

A header with explanation is required anyhow and it could be sufficient. There are only a handful of countries with special currencies. I don't know how much sense it makes to automatically parse them as every application has to decide what to do with these special cases.

Marc

marc wrote:

Hi Sami

I have added a comment header to the file countryInfo.txt : http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt

A header with explanation is required anyhow and it could be sufficient. There are only a handful of countries with special currencies. I don't know how much sense it makes to automatically parse them as every application has to decide what to do with these special cases.

Marc

I agree this is currently the best thing to do.

Just one question : what is the difference between http://geonames.cvs.sourceforge.net/geonames/data/countries.txt?revision=1.7&view=markup
and http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt ?

The file on CVS seems to have more fields....

I forgot to answer this posting, sorry.

It has legacy reasons. The exporter regenerates the file every night. If I have time I will fix this, though it is not on top of the priority list.

Cheers

Marc