[SCHEMA] Regions and/or continent data in ROR

[amandafrench]

Describe the problem you would like to solve Have heard from three users now, two at the Open Repositories conference in South Africa, that many ROR users would find it useful to have region and/or continent information in ROR -- not sub-units of countries such as administrative regions necessarily, but regions such as "Africa" that would encompass several countries.

Describe the solution you'd like If there is some kind of continental / regional grouping in Geonames (though I can't find one easily), then perhaps we can at least document how to use the Geonames ID to create such regions, but if not, then perhaps ROR records could be mapped to accepted regional schema such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme in the location field

Who would benefit from this feature? ROR adopters who are interested in regional tracking of research outputs for regions such as "Africa" or "the European Union"

[amandafrench]

Feel free to relabel as "schema" if that's more appropriate; not quite sure

[amandafrench]

Draft of proposal to add continent fields to v2.1 of the ROR schema: https://bit.ly/ror-schema-2-1-proposal