#263 Country string dimension type needed

[Steve Keen]

This is both a bug report and a feature request. I tried to give two Ravels the same axis name for COUNTRY, but the edits did not persist.

Secondly, this may have to be hard-coded for now, but ultimately there should be standard sub-types for the dimension STRING. The most critical here is country: whatever anyone types for a country (remember our Coronavirus database's weird date entries), a data type with the dimension COUNTRY should always impose the standard naming convention.

This is the standard database of country names and abbreviations: https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

[Steve Keen]

Here's an example of the non-standardised naming of countries.

[High Performance Coder]

It costs 300 CHF per year to get an updated spreadsheet of the country codes.
One can also obtain free of charge the codes from the website, as attached. Note the English country names are not copied in.

We will in any case need an additional column, which will be the unique search strings for identifying countries. So for example viet*nam, Democratic*Korea, North*Korea but not Korea.

Given that level of work, I doubt the paid for spreadsheet is useful.
For display, we can use the official English names, alpha 2 code, or alpha 3 code, perhaps by format string. By default, I think alpha 3 code is best.

[High Performance Coder]

Ticket moved from /p/minsky/ravel/50/