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Withdrawn Federal Information Processing Standard
The
FIPS
10-4
standard,
Countries, Dependencies, Areas of Special Sovereignty, and Their Principal Administrative Divisions
, was a list of two-letter country codes that were used by the U.S. Government for geographical data processing in many publications, such as the
CIA World Factbook
. The standard was also known as
DAFIF
0413 ed 7 Amdt. No. 3 (November 2003) and as DIA 65-18 (
Defense Intelligence Agency
, 1994, "Geopolitical Data Elements and Related Features").
The FIPS 10-4 codes are similar to (but sometimes incompatible with) the
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2
country codes
. The standard also includes codes for the top-level subdivision of the countries, similar to but usually incompatible with the
ISO 3166-2
standard.
History
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On September 2, 2008, FIPS 10-4 was one of ten standards withdrawn by
NIST
as a Federal Information Processing Standard.
[1]
The
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
continued to maintain the FIPS 10-4 codes in an informal document titled "Geopolitical Entities and Codes" (GEC) until December 31, 2014,
[2]
[3]
retiring the GEC on March 31, 2015.
[4]
On January 23, 2013, the
U.S. Department of Defense
released the first edition of "Geopolitical Entities, Names and Codes" (GENC), a U.S. federal government profile of
ISO 3166-1
and
ISO 3166-2
. GENC is designed to be compatible with ISO 3166 but reflect U.S. government
diplomatic recognition
and naming decisions by the
U.S. Board on Geographic Names
; it is intended to be the basis for a future U.S. national profile of the ISO standards.
[5]
See also
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References
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