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FIPS

FIPS is a collection of country and sub-country encodings and mappings based on Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 10-4 (aka FIPS PUB 10-4), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Now known as Geopolitical Codes, it is currently maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.[1]_

Projects Goals:

  • To easily transform the data into other formats (e.g., XML or JSON) or generate code for use in our favorite programming languages.
  • To provide a comprehensive mapping between FIPS PUB 10-4 and ISO 3166-2 codes.
  • To identify deactivated codes that will show up in historical data and/or from data/service providers.

Why use FIPS?

With the existence of ISO 3166-2 as an international standard, and NIST's withdrawal of FIPS PUB 10-4 as a federal standard, why bother with FIPS?

  • you have a lot of unconverted historical data that uses FIPS PUB 10-4 codes
  • there isn't a one-to-one mapping between FIPS PUB 10-4 and ISO 3166-2 codes

What data is available?

The data is (currently) maintained in a tab-separated-value (TSV) file, fips.txt.

A country row consists of the following fields:

  • FIPS PUB 10-3 code (2 characters)
  • country name
  • comment, e.g., type of administrative division

A sub-country row consists of the following fields:

  • FIPS PUB 10-4 code (4 characters)
  • sub-country name
  • comment, e.g., (Conventional Names), [former Names]

Footnotes

[1]http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/gazetteers2.html