BS ISO 3166-2:2020

What is ISO 31662 about?  

ISO 31662 is the second part of Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions in multi-series.  

ISO 31662 specifies basic guidelines for the implementation and maintenance of country subdivision codes. This code is intended for use in any application requiring the expression of current country subdivision names in coded form 

Who is ISO 3166-2 for? 

ISO 3166-2 on Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions is useful for: 

• Geographical studies 
• Geographical research 
• Overseas trading 

Why should you use ISO 3166-2?  

ISO 3166-2 specifies the principles for inclusion made in the list of country sub-division names also states the relationship between the categories of subdivision. ISO 3166-2 helps in assigning the code elements and determines the structure of country subdivision code elements. The change of paradigm helps to analyze and trace the changes made in the database content.  

ISO 3166-2 outlines guidelines on implementing and maintaining the country sub-division codes.  

What’s changed since the last update?  

BS ISO 3166-2:2020 supersedes BS ISO 3166-2:2013. BS ISO 3166-2:2020 

 includes some technical changes with respect to BS ISO 31662:2013. These include: 

• The codes have been moved to the database format 

• The components of the codes have been defined by descriptors, not by column or line numbers 
• The status of each alpha-2 country code element has been made explicit, as it is the main resource managed by ISO 3166/MA, necessary for traceability over time 
• All characters in the database, specifically those with diacritical marks, have been checked with the Universal Coded Character Set, ISO/IEC 10646, and are used consistently 
• The database encoding is UTF-8 (Universal Character Set Transformation Format -8 bits) from ISO/IEC 10646, and the same has been used in many applications