This is the GitHub repository for the CountryInfo.txt and related utility programs. CountryInfo.txt is a general purpose file intended to facilitate natural language processing of news reports and political texts. It was originally developed to identify states for the text filtering system used in the development of the Correlates of War project dataset MID4, then extended to incorporate CIA World Factbook and WordNet information for the development of TABARI dictionaries. File contains about 32,000 lines with country names, synonyms and other alternative forms, major city and region names, and national leaders. It covers about 240 countries and administrative units (e.g. American Samoa, Christmas Island, Hong Kong, Greenland). It is internally documented and almost but not quite XML.
Files:
CountryInfo.120116.txt: initial version of file
CountryInfo.140728.txt: Revision which has TABARI-style date restrictions on countries which became independent in the post-1989 period (mostly former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia) plus some additional small corrections.
format.rulers.org.pl: This Perl program translates one or more lines from the Rulers.org web site into the CountryInfo.txt format. rulers.org is almost but not quite consistent, so this was a utility used in the original development of the file; it might be useful for updates.
translate.countryinfo.pl: This Perl program translates the CountryInfo.120116.txt file in a TABARI-compatible file CountryInfo.YYMMDD.actors with some duplicate detection. It has not been modified to work with the date-restricted country codes in
PITF_to_ISO3166.txt: A Python dictionary that should get you most of the way to translating between the Political Instability Task Force country codes (SFTGCODE) to the ISO-3166-alpha3 codes used in ICEWS, Phoenix and pretty much everywhere else. This was done for a specific project and may not have all of the codes but should have most of them. PITF codes are fairly similar to COW code so this would probably be a good starting point on that translation as well. The dictionary is easier than reading the full CountryInfo file if all you need is this translation.