What do we mean by "Country"?

[stevieflow]

We seem to have two types of Country in the schema:

1 - strings

Recipient Org:Country - Details of the recipient of this grant. Country Organisation:Country - County

2 - codes

Beneficiary Location:Country Code - Location:Country Code - The ISO Country Code of the location of this activity.

The question - whether the first two instances are also expecting a country code, or just freetext. If the latter - is that likely to cause us issues later down the line?

[stevieflow]

some link to #90

[caprenter]

My reading is that the first two instances are NOT expecting a country code - just a string as you might write in an address e.g. Scotland.

If you follow the json schema, you can see that organisation has a location 'element' where a country code could be specified.

[timgdavies]

@caprenter's reading of the schema and docs is correct I think.

My sense is that asking for a Country Code in what is essentially an address requires additional work for the publisher, which could be done instead by a geocoder running over the address - and the presence of multiple address components help disambiguate when geocoding.

However, for locations, we're not asking for address information, and so explicit declaration of country code is more useful.

[stevieflow]

OK thanks @caprenter @timgdavies

I'm not going to close this, as it may require some attention to documentation to make this clearer, at some point

[stevieflow]

Action: check that documentation reflects this