ISO 3166 - Past, present and future

The table below broadly outlines the chronological development of the content, technical scope and maintenance system of ISO's country code standard.

1968 - 1974

From the 1960s onwards, a working group benefitting from the logistic support of ISO and consisting of ISO and UN experts started laying the basis for the ISO country coding system. Previous country code systems used in various organizations had not gained general acceptance. ISO conducted a survey of existing systems to be able to define their strengths and weaknesses. One of the major tasks of the experts was to define the number and categories of entities to be listed and coded in the ISO country code standard. Another one consisted in determining the length and character set of the code elements. Furthermore, a mechanism for the maintenance of the new standard had to be developed because user acceptance for this kind of standard critically depends on its being frequently updated.

1974

The result of the preparatory work was ISO 3166, published in December 1974. It listed about 220 "names of countries, dependencies and other areas of particular geopolitical interest". Most of the names in ISO 3166:1974 came from a list provided by the Statistical Office of the United Nations. Additions to this UN list had been made by the experts to achieve an even better coverage of the earth's land surface.

1976

The ISO 3166/MA was created in 1976. Since then, the ISO 3166/MA group of experts have been in charge of continuously updating ISO 3166. Since 1976, only 26 country names have been deleted completely from ISO 3166. A far larger number of changes to country names and/or their code elements have been announced by the ISO 3166/MA in the ISO 3166 Newsletters. Generally speaking, the list of code elements in ISO 3166 is very stable and changes are made only when necessary. The country names tend to change more often but these changes do not necessarily call for the creation of new code elements.

1981

A new, three-digit numeric code developed by the UN Statistics Division was added to ISO 3166 when the second edition of the standard was published. Before that time ISO 3166 listed only alphabetical codes:

The alpha-2 code, designed as the general purpose country code recommended for international exchange of goods and information.
The alpha-3 code, allowing a better visual association between the code elements and the country names and foreseen for applications where this feature might be of advantage.
Then, in 1981, the three-digit numeric code was added, useful in applications that require script independence (not every written language uses Roman chararcters!)

1988

The third edition of ISO 3166 was published. In the next few years the number of country names listed in ISO 3166 was greatly increased by the break-up of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia into new independent countries.

1993

The fourth edition consolidated the changes of the past five years.

Late 1990s

ISO 3166 was split into three parts in 1997. The first edition of each part of ISO 3166, was published between 1997 and 1999, thus resulting in the expansion of the coding system. ISO 3166-2 and ISO 3166-3 have significantly widened the scope of the coding system. This is particularly true for ISO 3166-2 which lists several thousand names and code elements for subdivisions of countries.

In the late 1990s, with the advent of the World Wide Web the popularity of the alpha-2 country codes increased drastically through its ubiquitous use as country code Top-Level Domain Identifiers (ccTLDs) in the Internet Domain Name System (DNS).

ISO 3166-1 has been instrumental in integrating the internet in many aspects of life (especially economical), the need for coded information relative to geographical concepts, such as places or country names, will continue to increase.

2006 to Present

The second editions of parts 1 and 2 of ISO 3166, were published, respectively in 2006 and 2007. These two new editions consolidated the updates. Furthermore, ISO 3166-1:2006 integrates information concerning the administrative languages used in each country and gives the local short name of the country.