Dataset: Countries

The dataset contains standardised information on countries published by the Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD).

The dataset contains ISO 3166 country codes published by and the Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the names of countries published by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the entire world, which are currently in use, for internal use on the EU Pollinator Hub.

The dataset is required by the EUPH for administrative purposes and fulfils an important role in data standardisation across datasets.

The dataset contains 291 records of countries included in the ISO standard 3166-1:2020 - Part 1: Country code and ISO 3166-3:2020 - Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries and 747 records of region names, sub-region names, intermediate region names, and 249 distinct countries or areas and their respective codes in three languages (English, French, Spanish) according to the Standard country or area codes for statistical use (M49) published by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD).

This data will be used for the standardisation of data integrated on the EU Pollinator Hub (EUPH).

Standardisation is an important goal of the EU Pollinator Hub (EUPH). Existing standards are prioritised to achieve this goal. The Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an important source for internationally recognized standards, for some of which ISO grants free-of-charge use. ISO-3166 is an internationally recognised and adopted, free-of-charge standard for country codes and their subdivisions. Its purpose is to provide codes of letters and numbers, which can – and should – be used when referring to countries and their subdivisions. The standard does not include the name of the countries, which have been imported from the Standard country or area codes for statistical use (M49) of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD). The dataset contains ISO-3166 country codes published by and the Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the names of countries published by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the entire world, which are currently in use, for internal use on the EU Pollinator Hub.

Raw data, containing part of the data contained in “ISO 3166-1:2020 Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 1: Country code” published by the Organization for Standardization (ISO), was manually sampled from the web page Online Browsing Platform (OBP) [1] on 2022-11-14 after selecting ‘Country codes’ from the main list, ‘Officially assigned codes’, ‘Formerly used’, ‘Transitionally reserved’ and ‘Exceptionally reserved’ as Code type and following the individual link provided for each country contained in the list. ‘Indeterminately reserved’ and ‘Unassigned’ code types were not integrated in the dataset. Standard country or area codes for statistical use (M49) where downloaded from the Website of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) on 2023-01-26 [2].

Data from the ISO web page was copied into a Microsoft® Excel® worksheet (Microsoft Corporation, Version 2210 Build 16.0.15726.20070). Prepared data was then converted to CSV. Data from, USDN was downloaded as csv file. Both were imported for profiling into a SQL database (MariaDB foundation, Server-Version 10.4.24) running in a XAMPP environment (BitRock, version 3.3.0). Data was exported from the MySQL database to CSV format using utf-8 coding. Data profiling was performed according to SOP-005 Data profiling using phpMyAdmin (version 5.2.0).

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