ISO 3166 - Past, present and future
The table below broadly outlines the chronological development of the content, technical scope and maintenance system of ISO's country code standard.
1968 - 1974
From the 1960s onwards, a working group benefitting from the logistic support of ISO and consisting of ISO and UN experts started laying the basis for the ISO country coding system. Previous country code systems used in various organizations had not gained general acceptance. ISO conducted a survey of existing systems with a view to defining their strengths and weaknesses. One of the major tasks of the experts was to define the number and categories of entities to be listed and coded in the ISO country code standard. Another one consisted in determining the length and character set of the code elements. In addition a mechanism for the maintenance of the new standard had to be developed because user appectance for this kind of standard critically depends on its being up to date.
1974
The result of the preparatory work was ISO 3166, published in December 1974. It listed about 220 "names of countries, dependencies and other areas of particular geopolitical interest". Most of the names in ISO 3166:1974 came from a list provided by the Statistical Office of the United Nations. Additions to this UN list had been made by the experts to achieve an even better coverage of the earth's land surface.
1976 - 2002
The ISO 3166/MA was created in 1976. Since then this group of experts has been in charge of continuously updating ISO 3166. During the 26 years passed by since 1976 only 26 country names have been deleted completely from ISO 3166. A far bigger number of changes to country names and/or their code elements have been announced by the ISO 3166/MA in the ISO 3166 Newsletters. Generally speaking, the list of code elements in ISO 3166 is very stable and changes are made only when necessary. The country names tend to change more often but not every such change calls for a new code element.
1981
A new, three-digit numeric code developed by the UN Statistics Division was added to ISO 3166 when the second edition of the standard was published. Before that time ISO 3166 listed only alphabetical codes:
* The alpha-2 code, designed as the general purpose country code recommended for international exchange of goods and information.
* The alpha-3 code, allowing a better visual association between the code elements and the country names and foreseen for applications where this feature might be of advantage.
* Then, in 1981, the three-digit numeric code was added, useful in applications that require script independence (not every written language uses Roman chararcters!)
1988
The third edition of ISO 3166 was published. In the next few years the number of country names listed in ISO 3166 was greatly increased by the break-up of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia into new independent countries.
1993
The fourth edition consolidated the changes of the past five years.
1997 - 1999
The fifth edition of ISO 3166, published between 1997 and 1999, resulted in the expansion of the coding system: ISO 3166-2 and ISO 3166-3 have significantly widened the scope of the coding system. This is particularly true for ISO 3166-2 which lists several thousand names and code elements for subdivisions of countries.
1997 - 2003
In the late 1990s, the World Wide Web made the alpha-2 country code more and more popular through its ubiquitous use as country code Top-Level Domain Identifiers (ccTLDs) in the Internet domain name system (DNS).
With the growing integration of the Internet into many aspects of (business-)life the need for coded information related to geographical concepts like country or place names will continue to rise. ISO 3166-1 is going to be one of the ISO standards which help facilitate this integration process - today and tomorrow.
