Utilities
Countries and territories is a controlled vocabulary that lists concepts associated with names of countries and territories. It is a corporate reference data asset covered by the Corporate Reference Data Management policy of the European Commission.
It provides codes and names of geospatial and geopolitical entities in all official EU languages and is the result of a combination of multiple relevant standards, created to serve the requirements and use cases of the EU institutions services. The vocabulary does not represent the official position of the European institutions with regard to the legal status or policy of the entities mentioned. Its main scope is to support documentary metadata activities.
The codes of the concepts included are correlated with the ISO 3166 international standard. The authority code relies where possible on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. Additional user-assigned alpha-3 codes have been used to cover entities that are not included in the ISO 3166-1 standard. The corporate list contains mappings with the ISO 3166-1 two-letter codes, the Interinstitutional Style Guide codes and with other internal and external identifiers including ISO 3166-1 numeric, ISO 3166-3, UNSD M49, UNSD Geoscheme, IBAN, TIR, IANA domain.
For the names of countries and territories, the corporate list synchronises with the Interinstitutional Style Guide (ISG, Section 7.1 and Annexes A5 and A6) and with the IATE terminology database.
Membership and classification properties provide possibilities to group concepts, e.g., UN, EU, EEA, EFTA, Schengen area, Euro area, NATO, OECD, UCPM, ENP-EAST, ENP-SOUTH, EU candidate countries and potential candidates.
Concepts are grouped into multiple concept schemes:
Countries and territories is maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union and disseminated on the EU Vocabularies website. Regular updates are foreseen based on its stakeholders’ needs.
Downloads in human-readable formats (.csv, .html) are available here. Additional technical information such as sample queries can be found on the EU Vocabularies Wiki page in Gitlab.