Alternative names

[gajus]

The lookup using remote sources will often fail because rarely does anyone use the official name (e.g. Russian Federation vs Russian and People's Republic of China vs China).

CountryData.lookup.countries({name: 'Russia'}); // Russian Federation
CountryData.lookup.countries({name: 'China'}); // People's Republic of China
CountryData.lookup.countries({name: 'USA'}); // The United States of America, United States, America
CountryData.lookup.countries({name: 'Iran'}); // Persia, Islamic Republic of Iran
CountryData.lookup.countries({name: 'Vietnam'}); // Socialist Republic of Vietnam

It would make sense to have "name_aka" field in JSON that would describe common variations.

[evdb]

The need for a name_aka field of some sort is clear. However I wonder if what you're suggesting could also be used to provide the country name in other languages?

Any thoughts on that?

[gajus]

From data normalisation perspective, I would like it to be something along the lines of:

names: [
    {
        name: 'Lithuania',
        language: 'en', /* ISO 639-1 */
        attributes: [
            'aka'
        ]
    },
    {
        name: 'Republic of Lithuania',
        language: 'en',
        attributes: [
            'official-name'
        ]
    },
    {
        name: 'Lietuva',
        language: 'lt',
        attributes: [
            'aka'
        ]
    },
    {
        name: 'Lietuvos Respublika',
        language: 'lt',
        attributes: [
            'official-name'
        ]
    }
]

See #28

[ziggamon]

Geonames has been handling this for a long time (and also has relevant data).
Look at for example: http://www.geonames.org/countries/US/united-states.html
(it allows multiple names per language. So it would hit for both USA U.S.A. U.S. and United Stated)