[glue-wg] Tighten defn of Country property?

[Paul Millar]

Hi Stephen,

On Friday 27 March 2009 10:25:19 Burke, S (Stephen) wrote:
> I think I'd be inclined to leave this as free-format text, I don't see a
> strong case where you'd need to parse it automatically

How about "finding out which CE job managers are in use at UK sites".  See [1]

[1] 
http://egee-uig.web.cern.ch/egee-uig/production_pages/Advancedldapsearch.html

> and this sort of thing can be politically sensitive.

True, but we defer that discussion (and corresponding political sensitivity) 
to ISO.

Also, ISO 3166-1 includes user-assigned codes that may be used to describe 
countries not recognised by ISO.  In any case, we do not mandate that people 
use ISO 3166-1; although other codes should not (RFC-2119) be used, it isn't 
forbidden.

> Also remember that locations can be broad, for example the nordugrid
> distributed tier-1 may want a list there.

Certainly, anyone can place any text they wish there.  I am not suggesting we 
mandate ISO 3166-1; rather that we say which code should be used.

I think the example you present isn't a strong argument.  The location has 
multiplicity "optional" (0..1), so using this field to represent a list 
doesn't seem appropriate.

To me, a more natural representation would be to leave the Location.country 
field blank and to publish four AdminDomains (one for each member country).  
Each of these would be a sub-Domain of the Nordugrid AdminDomain and would 
publish a Location object with Location.country specified using the 
appropriate ISO 3166-1 code.

Of course, Nordugrid are free to publish their Tier-1's Location.country 
attribute as a comma-separated list of member countries.  However, I feel 
that if many people do this we should review the multiplicity of this field.

On Friday 27 March 2009 10:26:46 Burke, S (Stephen) wrote:
> ... and of course the UK is not a country - England, Scotland and Wales
> are countries!

In fact, UK *is* a country, as are England, Scotland and Wales.  See:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

The thing that confuses people is that Great Britian isn't a country, but an 
island.  Further confusing is that the UK ISO 3166-1 code is "GB" (2-letter) 
or "GBR" (3-letter).

There isn't an ISO 3166-1 code for England, Scotland or Wales, so one can only 
represent an AdminDomain in England as UK, with corresponding code "GBR".

It's this sort of confusion I'd advocate we should avoid by recommending ISO 
3166-1 Alpha-3 for Location.country.

Cheers,

Paul.