Include GAC-approved country ids and names in the tables/choices/countries.json file

[Jmikelittle]

The CIO of Canada has set GAC's "Data reference standard on codes for current and past official names of countries, territories and geographic areas recognized by the Government of Canada" as the official data standard for names and ids of countries, territories and geographic areas. the countries.json file should be updated to reflect these names and id numbers. Continuing to use the two-letter ISO codes is ok in many scenarios, especially when dealing with pre-existing systems or datasets.

The official list is already available as open data at: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/cac6fd9f-594a-4bcd-bf17-10295812d4c5

I'm happy to help in any way.

[JVickery-TBS]

@Jmikelittle The country.json file is generated with https://github.com/open-data/ckanext-canada/blob/master/bin/download_country.py which just uses the https://github.com/datasets/country-codes dataset.

Specifically it uses the ISO 3166 codes and names which is the official data standards listed by GAC in your link above. So the only thing we are missing is the usage of the GAC Appendix A? the usage of GC_ID and GC_HIST_ID.

Granted this is for: "data reference standard applies to datasets and systems that are developed after the effective date of this reference standard."

Do you think we can keep the data values as the ISO codes, but then just add the GC_ID and GC_HIST_ID to the describing data dictionary for dataset resources which use the country.json choices. E.g. the Contracts data: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/d8f85d91-7dec-4fd1-8055-483b77225d8b/resource/fac950c0-00d5-4ec1-a4d3-9cbebf98a305 (see under Data Dicitonary > Country of Vendor > Choices). If we output any GC_IDs and GC_HIST_IDs that relate to the respective ISO codes.

[Jmikelittle]

Thanks for responding Jesse.
Overall, Canada has created the GC_ID so that we can uniquely reference specific english and french names of countries, territories, areas, etc. We needed to have our own list in order to reflect Canadian foreign policy. ISO codes are provided for concordance purposes; they're not an official standard. We want to collect the GC_ID in their place so that we can show the approved country names.

This is troublesome because the GC_IDs are numbers and not as easy to use as ISO. It's not obvious what each country is without the corresponding full english and french name.

We don't need to use GC_HIST_ID, it's useful for point in time labelling when various systems need to be extremely precise for international data sharing or legal requirements. Not discounting that some datasets would benefit from this, but I don't think it's a default requirement.

I need to do some digging to determine whether the standard on vendor records needs to be amended in order to make any changes to the country lists.

[PatLittle]

@Jmikelittle If you are working on getting compliance on reference data standards in the contracting data with OCG and others - it would be a real improvement to get the CRA business number added as an field (following the vendor record standard, etc) in the data.