Country

Multi-lingual thesaurus of country names mapped to ISO 3166. The purpose of this section of the site is to provide GBIF Participants with an easy mechanism to link country names in their native language to the ISO 3166 standard and to provide a basic dictionary file for any other transformations that might be needed. Source data for countries has been taken from the Geonames database of place names and coordinates. Geonames is by far the largest source of this kind of data available. Ultimately we will try to synchronise alternative place names within this site and Geonames automatically, pulling data from their web services which are available at http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html. We seek input from additional editors who are willing to provide names of countries in languages in which they are familiar.