The IP to Country Database

No, thats wrong.

Great Britain is the term used for the island containing the contiguous nations of England, Scotland and Wales.

England, Scotland and Wales together with the province of Northern Ireland, form the country officially known as "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" or simply the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom does not include the Isle of Man (which lies between Great Britain and the island of Ireland) and the Channel Islands (which lie off the North coast of France). These are direct dependencies of the British Crown, maintaining their own legislative, monetary and taxation systems. Each have their own parliaments and a Governor, appointed by the Crown.

The British Isles is used more loosely to describe the main island of Great Britain together with its associated islands (including the Isle of Man). It has no legal significance.

The Channel Islands, which include the independent States of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark, are the only remaining components of the "Duchy of Normandy" which still belong to the British Crown.

The United Kingdom (including the Channel Islands, but without the Isle of Man) is a member of the European Union. The Isle of Man maintains free-trade agreements with the EU, but is not a member.

- There is no official term to describe all of these nations collectively AFAIAA

Lastly, to all of you meeting for the first time a national from any of the nations above: !!we are not all English!!. To many people that is 'fighting' talk. You *might* be safe with a collective such as Brit or British but *never* formally use it with someone from Northern Ireland.

The DB I just got had 'GB','GBR' for United Kingdom and no UKs. Is this how it's going to stay? I don't mind what the code is as long as it's consistent.


btw For most purposes Great Britain and the United Kingdom mean pretty much the same thing, I'm British and I don't know the difference. England is a part (let's say a quarter) of GB / UK.

Cheers.

I read and understand that this database is based on iso standards. However:

GB != UK

GB == UK maybe wishful thinking on behalf of relevant iso bodies. It would not be the first time that iso standards have been wrong. Even my 14 month old sons passport is entitled 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. Heck, they dont even list 'Sealand'. Which is not British, but then again it could be, well its not a country, but then it is, but it does exist ;)

So UK is 'exceptionally reserved'. Following the link tells me that this means 'Code element may be used but restrictions may apply'. Looking further (extract) '.. This applies to certain code elements required in order to support a particular application ..'
- I think that this database supports this requirement so the tag can be used.
Furthermore I notice other 'exceptionally reserved' British Isles country tags are not in the database: GG (Guernsey), IM (Isle of Man), and JE (Jersey). I can only assume that now they fall under GB.
Politics and nationalistic values aside this means that I cannot target any specific British land body that happens to be in this part of the world. This is the whole point of this db isnt it? - to me that is a big issue.
'When' iso 3166-2 is ratified alot of this will be mute as obviously then, assuming that its provided for in the db, I can target nations anywhere.

Any chances of the exceptionally reserved tags going back in?

I see what you mean. The reason all 'UK' code elements were replaced by 'GB' was that according to the ISO standard they both represent 'UNITED KINGDOM' and to remove the ambiguity we stuck to the one that was "Officially assigned".

Its only from your perspective that we can see the local picture since we are limited by space and time. That is the reason why we set up this community where people like you can tell us what its like at ground zero and guide the evolution of the database to be more acurate and reliable.

Thank you Sean

Thanks for the gracious reply sandeep, much appreciated.

In case you are all considering reimplementing the exceptionally reserved code elements I have some input which leads to a couple of proposals.

The first is based on what is available in iso 3166-1, that is code elements GB, UK, JE, GG, and IM. I suggest that JE, GG, and IM are reimplemented.

UK *should* be used to categorise what is England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland as GB is wrong, especially in the iso oversight of not having a Northern Ireland code element. A Northern Ireland code element is provided for in iso 3166-2 which is in my second proposal below. Of course, using code elements GB -or- UK does not seperate the land masses that are GB and Northern Ireland (seperated by water).
Again, the point of this db is to provide the geographical location of (or the registraar of) an IP address. It is more useful to know what land mass it lies in.

So it is my suggestion that if you stay within the confines of iso 3166-1, that GB is used to represent England, Wales & Scotland, while UK would represent Northern Ireland.
Not ideal but it would solve the problem.

My second proposal delves into iso 3166-2 (Country subdivision codes). I realise that some of what I outline below could be construed as accomodating 'some land masses off the coast of Europe that have some kind of British heritage or connection'.
I also know however that it would allow for more specific location information to be provided for in the database now or in the future.
Obvious examples would be larger countries such as Canada, US, Australia etc. where a higher specifity might be desired, but of course could apply to any country.

I am sure that you are aware of iso 3166-2 but for the record (from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2 , which also provides a wiki of some of the iso 3166-2 codes):

iso 3166-2 codes consist of two parts, separated by "-". The first part is the iso 3166-1 alpha-2 code element, the second is alphabetic or numeric and has one, two or three digits. The second part often is based on national standards.

Keeping with the British entities, I would only be interested in the country specific codes at this time, which are:

GB-ENG (England)
GB-SCT (Scotland)
GB-NIR (Northern Ireland)
GB-WLS (Wales)
GB-CHA Channel Islands
* GB-GSY (Guernsey)
* GB-JSY (Jersey)
GB-IOM (Isle of Man)

• This scheme is more desirable as it specifically accomodates Wales and Scotland.
• Obviously this would mean an addional column would be required in the database. It would also make sense that if this scheme was used to stick with GB for the iso 3166-1 code element.
• There is a kind of parent child type relationship within these iso 3166-2 codes (not just above). Not sure how this would be accomodated, an idea might be to seperate code elements via a semicolon so it is kept within one column. eg. GB-CHA;GB-JSY (ie. Jersey comes under Channel Islands, GB). This list might be a bit clearer in that it shows more of these parent child relationships: http://www.uddi.org/taxonomies/iso3166-1999-utf8.txt
• In the first instance all entries within the database should have this new column set to their corresponding iso 3166-1 entry, perhaps appended with the hyphen. This would allow a simple strlen check to ascertain if a more specific location is available.
• This would all cause some additional time spent to apply these iso 3166-2 codes to existing entries. I have no idea what kind of maintenance is required to keep existing entries up to date (if any) but of course adding new ip address blocks would require additional investigation. An idea here of course is to enlist the help of the community. Make it your own goal to keep the list in order with the current setup (which is obviously what is done anyway) and leave it up to the community to provide iso 3166-2 data - count me in for the British parts.

ok, so that was long and windy. Just wanting to get my point across. My preferered choice, if there is one, would of course be the second proposal :)

Cheers!

Further reading (IMO interesting and pertains to this subject): http://www.idude.net/I18N/articles/web_forms_and_iso_3166.asp

Can we just delete references to "GB" and replace with "UK", United Kingdom, as noted, is not equal to GB/Great Britain. If the long name is United Kingdom then the short name has to be "UK".

Someone stated above that Jersey, Guernsey and the Ilse of Man are not in the UK - AFAIK this is neither true nor false, some UK legislation refers to them being within the UK, and some refers to them not being in the UK. For the purposes of the European Union they are not in the UK. For the Royal Mail UK mainland delvery rates apply.

Yup GB should definately be replaced with UK, it makes it match up properly with the UK country domain, makes things much simpler and correct.