Links

Please try the links given below. We have found them useful in one context or another related to ISO 3166. Please also read our disclaimer.

The links are grouped in three categories:

• other country codes,
• geographical information and
• miscellaneous

Other country codes

The world is diverse. There are many country coding systems. Here is a selection of systems which are not, or only partly, compatible with ISO 3166-1 and which you may find useful to know in order to avoid confounding them with either of the three codes in ISO 3166-1.

• Distinguishing Signs of Road Vehicles in International Traffic, i.e. the country codes you see on oval plates on cars are defined in a UN Convention on Road Traffic.
• ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, maintains a (up to) three-letter code for member countries which is very similar to the ISO 3166-1 three-letter code but not identical.
• Here are the Telephone Country Codes at a glance. And in even more detail, e.g. the complete breakdown of St Lucia or Switzerland, here's a vast listing of the telephone numbering plan on the pages of www.numberplan.org.
• The International Olympic Committee and the National Olympic Committees (here the African NOCs) use a three-letter country code.
• FIPS 10-4, the Federal Information Processing Standard issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States provides country and country subdivision codes, different from those in ISO 3166-1 and ISO 3166-2.

Geographical information, place names and maps

What would all the country codes in the world be good for, if we could not relate them to physical features or at least representations of physical features like maps?

• The Map Machine on Nationalgeographic.com gives you maps of the whole world.
• Geographical information from the Institute Géographique Français (IGN).
• In the United States the Web pages of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency provide access to a wide range of information. Also visit NIMA's GeoNames Server.
• Detailed maps of the United Kingdom are available (read conditions that apply) from the Get-a-map  Page of the Ordnance Survey, Britain's National Mapping Agency.
• Maps from all over the world are linked at The World of Maps (ETH-Library, Zürich, CH). Well worth a visit.
• The Cartographic Section of the UN Department for Public Information has a wide range of maps avalable for download.
• Links to hundreds of University Departments and Faculties on Geography at the University of Colorado or the University of Innsbruck

Miscellaneous sources of information

Useful sites that may come in handy once you know they are there.

• Governments of the world gives you access to many official pages of countries' Governments. Although not updated for quite a while, it offers a wealth of information.
• The Hague International Model United Nations, an NGO, gives access to many Government pages in the world. (If you ask yourself which country code they use: it is FIPS 10-4 from the US.)
• Codes for the representation of names of languages can be obtained from the Web pages of the ISO 639-2 Registration authority held by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
• A list of the ISO 4217 codes for the representation of currencies and funds is available here.
• And last, but not least, the World Standards Services Network (WSSN) gives you access to worldwide standardization activities and the organizations involved in the standardization process.

Disclaimer: The comments given on the links express the opinion of the ISO 3166/MA Secretariat. The inclusion of such links into the ISO 3166/MA Web pages is for information only and does not express any official endorsement or recommendation of such external pages by ISO. Please also keep in mind that the content on these external pages is the intellectual property of the owners. Further, we want to state that ISO is not responsible for the content of the above-mentioned external Web pages or of any other resources outside the domain "iso.org".