‘XK’ country code for Kosovo (original) (raw)

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Some of you have already noticed that we are now using ”XK‘ as temporary country code for Kosovo. While the US standards body ‘FIPS’ has found it worthwhile to assign a country code to Kosovo (KV), the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, has yet to assign a code to the former Serbian province. The ISO country code standard 3166 has a couple of unused codes that can be used for user specific elements: “_If users need code elements to represent country names not included in this part of ISO 3166, the series of letters AA, QM to QZ, XA to XZ, and ZZ, and the series AAA to AAZ, QMA to QZZ, XAA to XZZ, and ZZA to ZZZ respectively and the series of numbers 900 to 999 are available._”

The European Commission and many other organisations (Deutsche Bundesbank, Switzerland) are using ‘XK‘ as a temporary country code for Kosovo till ISO officially assigns a code.

GeoNames will switch to the official ISO code as soon as it has been released. In the meantime we will use ‘XK‘.