FIDE Country and Federation Codes

I'm interrupting this series on engine operators, last seen in Houdini, Komodo, Stockfish, to solve an unrelated problem. Recent posts like Titled Players and Their Continents and GM Players and Their Mobility depend on reliable data that links other data together: for example, how are FIDE federations related to the FIDE continent structure.

Until now I've relied on a half-dozen data tables collected since 2003. Every time I started a new post on FIDE ratings, the tables required re-checking to determine if they were sufficiently up-to-date. They also deserved to be more public, because the assumptions built into them were exactly that -- assumptions -- and other knowledgeable persons might not agree.

To tackle these concerns, I consolidated the existing tables into a single new table and loaded the result into a web page. You can see the new table in a page titled FIDE Country and Federation Codes.

I know the data is far from perfect. Here are a few more issues to be addressed:-

• Some data is missing.
• The last column ('FIDE ID') is not always unique to each federation.
• The zone numbers for Europe (continent '1') are perhaps obsolete and no longer used.
• The zones and subzones for other continents are not up-to-date (my base FIDE data is from 2003).
• The data should be reconciled with FIDE Country Codes [chessgames.com; 'research by member Zanzibar'] and FIDE Immigration Patterns (and "Country Codes") [zanchess.wordpress.com; May 2014].

Nevertheless, those bullets gives me a clear roadmap to improve the data. I'll tackle them as time permits.