UN/LOCODE
Geographic coding scheme
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Structure
UN/LOCODEs have five characters. The first two letters code a country by the table defined in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. The three remaining characters code a location within that country. Letters are preferred, but if necessary digits 2 through 9 may be used, excluding "0" and "1" to avoid confusion with the letters "O" and "I" respectively.
For each country there can be a maximum of 17,576 entries using only letters (26×26×26), or 39,304 entries using letters and digits (34×34×34).
For the US, the letter combinations have almost all been exhausted. So in 2006, the Secretariat added 646 entries with a digit as the last character.
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Loose consistency with existing IATA airport codes
For airports, the three letters following the country code are not always identical to the IATA airport code. According to the Secretariat note for Issue 2006-2, there are 720 locations showing a different IATA code.
Official UN/LOCODE tables
UN/LOCODEs are released as a table. An individual revision is officially referred to as an "issue". A discussion of the table's structure follows.
Examples
- Explanations
- US NYC for New York City in the United States. Subdivision is the U.S. state of New York (see ISO 3166-2:US). Function: port, rail, road, airport, postal. IATA code is NYC. Coordinates: 40°42′N 074°00′W / 40.700°N 74.000°W.
- DE BER for Berlin (city) in Germany. Subdivision is the German state of Berlin (see ISO 3166-2:DE). Function: port, rail, road, airport, postal. IATA code is BER. Coordinates: 52°31′N 013°23′E / 52.517°N 13.383°E.
- DE TXL for Berlin-Tegel Airport in Germany. Function: airport. IATA code is TXL.
- FR PAR for Paris (city) in France. Subdivision is the French department of Paris (see ISO 3166-2:FR). Function: port, rail, road, postal.
- GB PAR for Par in United Kingdom. Subdivision is the English county of Cornwall (see ISO 3166-2:GB). Function: port.
- SE GOT for Göteborg (Goteborg without diacritics) in Sweden. Subdivision is the Swedish county of Västra Götaland (see ISO 3166-2:SE). Function: port, airport, postal. The IATA code of XWL indicated in the table is that of a train station in the city centre of Göteborg (though not the Central Station), while the IATA code for the main airport (Göteborg Landvetter Airport) is actually GOT. It also has a separate reference entry showing an alternate spelling of Gothenburg.
Data fields
The fields are listed in the official order.
Ch (Changes)
- A change from the previous issue is indicated by one of the following characters in the first column:
- X Marked for deletion in the next issue
- # Change in location name (usually spelling)
- ¦ Other changes in the entry (not location)
- + Entry added to the current issue
- = Reference entry
- ! Retained for certain entries in the USA code list ("controlled duplications")
Locode
- The code is represented with a space between the alpha-2 codes of ISO 3166-1 country code and the 3-character element.
Name
- Names of locations should be shown using the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet with, where appropriate, diacritic signs as contained in ISO 10646-1/1993 or ISO 8859-1/1987.
Name Without Diacritics
- The name of the location, but non-practicable Diacritics may be ignored and should not be converted into additional characters(e.g., Göteborg may be read as Goteborg, rather than Goeteborg, Gothenburg, Gotembourg, etc.).
- Can contain an apostrophe, e.g. L'viv
SubDiv (Subdivision)
- The ISO 1 to 3 character alphabetic and/or numeric code for the administrative division (state, province, department, etc.) of the country, as included in ISO 3166-2/1998. Only the latter part of the complete ISO 3166-2 code element (after the hyphen) is shown.
Function
- Each defined function gets a classifier; the most important are:
- 1 = port (for any kind of waterborne transport)
- 2 = rail terminal
- 3 = road terminal
- 4 = airport
- 5 = postal exchange office
- 6 = Inland Clearance Depot – ICD or "Dry Port", "Inland Clearance Terminal", etc.
- 7 = fixed transport functions (e.g. oil platform)"; the classifier "7" is reserved for this function. Noting that the description "oil pipeline terminal" would be more relevant, and could be extended to cover also electric power lines and ropeway terminals.
- B = Border crossing function
- 0 = function not known, to be specified
Status
- Indicates the status of the entry by a 2-character code. The following codes are used at present:
- AA: Approved by competent national government agency
- AC: Approved by Customs Authority
- AF: Approved by national facilitation body
- AI: Code adopted by international organisation (IATA or ECLAC)
- AM: Approved by the UN/LOCODE Maintenance Agency
- AQ: Entry approved, functions not verified
- AS: Approved by national standardisation body
- RL: Recognised location - Existence and representation of location name confirmed by check against nominated gazetteer or other reference work
- RN: Request from credible national sources for locations in their own country
- RQ: Request under consideration
- UR: Entry included on user's request; not officially approved
- RR: Request rejected
- QQ: Original entry not verified since date indicated
- XX: Entry that will be removed from the next issue of UN/LOCODE
Date
- The date the location was added or updated: 0207 is July 2002, 9501 is January 1995, etc.
- The edition published in 2008 uses the value 0701 for additions, while in other cases the exact month is used like 9710, 0212.
IATA
- For correlation purposes, the IATA code for the location is marked if different from the second part of the UN/LOCODE.
Coordinates
- Some entries have coordinates in the database. They are represented as: ddmmN dddmmW, ddmmS dddmmE, etc.
Remarks
- The remarks column can among other things contain a hint to what specifically was changed (See data field - "Change").
Availability
Availability UN/LOCODE is available on the UNECE website, where the latest release of UNLOCODE directories and background documents are listed. Complete UN/LOCODE code list may be downloaded in the format of.mdb (MS Access database), .txt (text file) and .csv (Comma-separated values). HTML pages are also displayed on the website by countries.
Data Maintenance Requests
UN/LOCODE Data Maintenance Request system is web-based (http://apps.unece.org/unlocode/), which enables registered users to submit online requests for new UN/LOCODE entry modifications.
The system provides online functions for
- Registration of users and password retrieval
- Submission of requests for new UN/LOCODE entries
- Submission of requests for modification changes in existing UN/LOCODE entries
- A guide to explain the use of the system
Release history
- Notes
- + Additions to the current issue
- ¦ Other changes
- # Change in location (spelling or other)
- X Entries marked for deletion in the next issue