Constellation: A Prototype ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry

Different systems across the government, as well as in the private sector, use different country names or country codes to represent the notion of a “country” within a particular problem domain. These systems may choose to represent countries using a particular standard for county names and country codes. Often times these systems find themselves interacting with other systems that may use another standard for country representation. This makes it difficult to compare and link country-related data in a consistent fashion. We describe our work on the Constellation system using the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata standard to register the various country code sets in a common metamodel. This facilitates management, querying, updating and mapping the elements within the code sets.