Michael via tde-users wrote:
Thinking about it, Mexico (United Mexican States
actually and why is that
a top level category?), Honduras, Panama, etc. are North America too.
I think we need a North America added to the region list, as that list is
huge (and missing?):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territ…
A bunch of those I would have called Atlantic as well (Bahamas?, Cuba?),
but 'eh...
Where did the list of regions you posted earlier come from? “Central and
South America” seems made up? This shows Central America as a sub-region
of North America. What I’m guessing below is called “Middle East” is
officially called “Western Asia.”
The list comes from the original file weather_stations.desktop. I think it
was a pragmatic approach to group regions and states and make it easier to
navigate in the configuration.
Look at the configuration of kweather applet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_M49
In that, it’s always best to get the mapping correct first, would it be
better if I compiled (AKA stripped from wiki!) a list of regions to
countries?
Using one level of delineation gives 6 regions:
Africa
Antarctica
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
Using the second level of delineation gives 17 regions. And shows that
list is crap as it combines Central America, South America, and the
Caribbean into “Latin America and the Caribbean.” Leave it to the UN to
just outright insult people.
Yes I was thinking the same, but the code allows only 2 levels:
Region -> State. Bigger countries that have many federal states appear as a
region. I do not think this can be changed easily as the code is based on
this concept.
So for now it would be enough to get it working in a meaningful state.
Remember we started when Stefan complained Berlin Schönefeld is not in the
list.
Then we found out that only few stations are in the list, because the
mapping for the others was missing in weather_stations.desktop
# # #
So, great,
https://www.thoughtco.com/official-listing-of-countries-world-region-1435153
https://ourworldindata.org/world-region-map-definitions
nobody seems to have any consistent world region definition. I don’t
know, mostly I think I’d chuck the first region list and just go with
countries by continent? At least it’s stable and no one is going to have
to guess where their country is, also the second link above seems to have
a .csv file of that already built. Then again, you’d probably need to
change “Oceania” to “Australia and Oceania” (as Oceania is not a
continent…).
So completely dazed and confused...
Michael
Yes I can understand it - this is why I wrote we need a world committee of
TDEs kweather :D
I would go pragmatic - as it seems many people from Canada use TDE it would
make sense to extend the list with stations for Canadian states.
If someone complains (like you) we could change also this and that. It is
absolutely arbitrary how you group the states into regions, so we can
remove/add regions or remap states to regions.
What I would avoid is adding a new level, although it would make more sense,
because then we could group them into continents or geographic regions ->
countries -> states.
On the other hand if you go bottom up it makes sense to define a country as
region and map stations to states only if there are too many stations to
fit into a country alone ... but who is saying what is "too many"
So I too would say it makes sense to have Australasia split into Australia
and for example Pacific Ocean or Oceania and Central and South America
split into Central America and South America and some countries defined as
regions like Brazil or Russia or even may be China - IMO it depends how
many stations are listed there.
You can check for your self if you generate the two files and replace them
on the file system - then navigate to kweathers configuration.
Should we try Central America and South America and may be North America for
the countries that are not Mexico, USA and Canada?
This can easily be done ... I mean more or less without touching the code
but just the mappings.
Copy of original list for reference:
> [ME]
> name=Middle East
>
> [US]
> name=United States
>
> [CA]
> name=Canada
>
> [MX]
> name=Mexico
>
> [EU]
> name=Europe
>
> [AF]
> name=Africa
>
> [OZ]
> name=Australasia
>
> [AS]
> name=Asia
>
> [M_]
> name=Central and South America
>
> [AT]
> name=Atlantic