Hi !
I noticed a data anomaly. Consider the US. There is an extra entry in the shape-file for the US as is, one for American Samoa, one for Guam, one for Northern Mariana Islands. And so on.
The same for Australia, e.g. the Ashmore and Cartier Islands.
But for France, several territories are put into the record 73. That is, there is not only Mainland France contained in this record, but also some overseas territories, e.g. caribian islands.
Is this by intent or an oversight?
Overseas regions of France like:
1. Guadeloupe (in the Caribbean)
2. French Guiana (in South America)
3. Martinique (in the Caribbean)
4. Réunion (in the Indian Ocean)
are considered geo-units of France in the Natural Earth coding system. They are like Alaska and Hawaii in USA, integral parts of France. While the ISO considers them “countries” they are not. France disagrees with the ISO coding but has not logged an official complaint. Other units (territories, collectives) of France are listed at the adm-0 “country” level in Natural Earth.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Regions_of_France
Does that help?
Okay, that helped. Seems that this is intentional. Didn’t knew that they even send somebody to the European Community.
For me this means that I cannot use the admin-0-countries to label the actual countries, because those four territories won’t get a name then.
While they would get the adm0 name “France”, you could label them with the geoUnit name. The preferred method is to label them: “GeoUnit (Terr.)”. Example: Terr. = Fr. and GeoUnit = Guadeloupe. So test if GeoUnit == the Adm0 Name then output = Adm0 Name else output = GeoUnit & ” (” & “Adm0 Name & “)” endif. This is slightly easier (via data column attributes) in the forthcoming 1.1 update.
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