FIPS is a collection of country and sub-country encodings and mappings based on Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 10-4 (aka FIPS PUB 10-4), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Now known as Geopolitical Codes, it is currently maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.1
Projects Goals:
- To easily transform the data into other formats (e.g., XML or JSON) or generate code for use in our favorite programming languages.
- To provide a comprehensive mapping between FIPS PUB 10-4 and ISO 3166-2 codes.
- To identify deactivated codes that will show up in historical data and/or from data/service providers.
With the existence of ISO 3166-2 as an international standard, and NIST's withdrawal of FIPS PUB 10-4 as a federal standard, why bother with FIPS?
- you have a lot of unconverted historical data that uses FIPS PUB 10-4 codes
- there isn't a one-to-one mapping between FIPS PUB 10-4 and ISO 3166-2 codes
The data is (currently) maintained in a tab-separated-value (TSV) file, fips.txt.
A country row consists of the following fields:
- FIPS PUB 10-3 code (2 characters)
- country name
- comment, e.g., type of administrative division
A sub-country row consists of the following fields:
- FIPS PUB 10-4 code (4 characters)
- sub-country name
- comment, e.g., (Conventional Names), [former Names]