New ISO 3166-1 implementation for Pharo Smalltalk

Introduction

If your application lists any of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, South Yemen, USSR, Serbia and Montenegro countries then you have an obsolescence problem. The same as if it doesn't known about South Sudan, Jersey or East Timor.

Geopolitical map has changed, countries around the world have dissolved, merged and new ones were created. As of August 2015, ISO web site lists 249 official countries. Unfortunately their list is not made available free of charge, but there are a few reliable places where its lists is available (ex: Wikipedia).

To keed updated regarding world political situation and providing more features, I developed an ISO 3166-1 wrapper to access objects into a ISO3166 model. This is, including only information contained in the ISO standard, not calling codes, not language tags or other data located at external standards. Installation instructions, usage and reference links are provided in this document. Code is in the SmalltalkHub repository. The Metacello Configuration is accessible from the Pharo Configuration Browser, in Pharo 4 (released in 2015), or Pharo catalog in Pharo 5 (to be released in 2016).

Documentation is available in PDF format. Suggestion, fixes and improvements are very welcome. Don’t hesitate to contribute if you want to add new features.

Examples

To get a sorted Collection with all ISO-3166 codes:

ISO3166P1 sortedIso3166Codes.

To obtain a Collection of all the countries with all ISO-3166 country names:

ISO3166P1 sortedCountryNames.   " a SortedCollection('Afghanistan' 'Albania' 'Algeria' ... "

Get an ISO3166P1Code of France from 2-letter or 3-letter code:

ISO3166P1 atLetterCode: 'FR'.
ISO3166P1 atLetterCode: 'FRA'.  " an ISO3166P1Code (France) "

Obtain a String with the ISO 3166 code number for Zimbabwe:

ISO3166P1 codeNumberFrom2LetterCode: 'ZW'. "716"

Obtain the three-letter String country code of Niger:

(ISO3166P1 atCountryName: 'Niger') codeThreeLetter. " 'NER' "
(ISO3166P1 atCountryName: 'nIGeR') codeThreeLetter. " 'NER' "

Obtain the two-letter String country code of Burundi:

(ISO3166P1 atCountryName: 'Burundi') codeTwoLetter. " 'BI' "

Obtain a String representing the country code top-level domain of Denmark:

(ISO3166P1 atCountryName: 'Denmark') ccTLD. " '.dk' "

Read More

GADM: Access to Global Administrative Areas in Smalltalk

Introduction

GADM is a high-resolution spatial database of the location of the world's administrative areas for use in GIS and similar software. GADM is freely available for academic and other non-commercial use. The data contained in GADM was collected from spatial databases provided by NGO, National Governments, and/or maps and list of names available on the Internet (e.g. from Wikipedia).

Administrative areas include: countries, provinces, counties, departments, etc. up to five sublevels, which cover most boundaries in the world. For each level it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and in some cases variant names. GADM can also be used to extract polygon shapes for visualization, for example to build choropleth maps for regions. The GADM package includes the raw data in CSV format, which I parsed to build a browseable GADM world tree, allowing off-line access to the GADM database in a hierarchical fashion with objects, without need to perform on-line queries for basic requests. A hierarchical tree can be used to build a toponym browser for example.

Installation

From within Pharo 3, or Pharo 4 you can use the Configuration Browser, or evaluate the following expression:

Gofer it
 smalltalkhubUser: 'hernan' project: 'GADM';
 configurationOf: 'GADM';
 loadStable.

Usage Examples

" To access to the whole World (as seen by GADM), evaluate "
GADMWorldTree root.

" Access country Lithuania "
GADMWorldTree @ 'Lithuania'.

" To acces the Part (Partido: spanish) where I am living:"
GADMWorldTree @ 'Argentina' @ 'Buenos Aires' @ 'La Plata'.

" You want to know which type of region is Los Angeles "
(GADMWorldTree @ 'United States' @ 'California' @ 'Los Angeles') typeName " 'County' "

" You wish to list all subregions in San Marino "
(GADMWorldTree @ 'San Marino') nodeNames
 " a SortedCollection('Acquaviva' 
'Borgo Maggiore' 
'Chiesanuova' 
'Domagnano' 
'Faetano' 
'Fiorentino' 
'Montegiardino' 
'San Marino' 
'Serravalle') "

Enjoy

Read More