Classifying Administrative Districts

GeoNames is an open-access geographical database which provides latitude and longitude for millions of entries (countries, cities, geographic features, buildings, postal codes, etc.), and provides translations of placenames in multiple languages. It provides for four levels of political administration below the country level. We have stressed state/province and municipality above, and would capture here any smaller or different types of administrative unit. Note that we follow the practice of GeoNames in treating these administrative units as geographical phenomena despite them being political creations.

GeoNames also has classes for former administrative units of each type. We could capture such units synthetically by adding the term 'former.'

Other classes in GeoNames that we could capture synthetically include 'dependent state/territory' and 'territory leased to another state.' 'Buffer zone' could be '(territory)(between)(states)' with perhaps (limited)(military). Parish would be an administrative district associated with organized religion of a particular type.

Note that users of BCC could use GeoNames to quickly identify the latitude and longitude of any location in their extensive database.