Country Classification Commons

What is this?

Country Classification Commons consolidates authoritative country metadata from five official sources into a single, machine-readable dataset that is refreshed automatically up to 10× per week. It is designed for UN agencies, INGOs, academics, students, and data professionals who need consistent, citable classification metadata without having to manually maintain their own lookup tables.

Browse and search 248 countries/areas with 4 367 group memberships in the Explorer.
Download clean CSV or JSON files, or use permanent raw links in your code or BI tool.
One row per country-group pair — tidy data ready for merging into your own analysis.
Every run is timestamped, checksummed, and diffed against the previous snapshot.

Open Explorer Open Example Uses Get Downloads Read Methodology

Datasets

countries_master — 248 rows, one per country/area with ISO2/ISO3/M49, UN regions, WB income, FCS, OECD DAC, names in 6 languages
country_group_membership — 4 367 rows, long-format: every country–group relationship
country_classification_library — fully denormalized join of the above two tables
sources & run_manifest — provenance, access timestamps, and SHA-256 checksums

Sources covered

UN M49 — geoscheme, LDC/LLDC/SIDS, multilingual names
UN SDG API — SDG geographic groupings
World Bank API — income level, lending type, WB region
World Bank FCS — Fragile & Conflict-affected Situations (latest FY)
OECD DAC — ODA recipient list (latest published CSV)

Automation

GitHub Actions runs the pipeline twice each weekday and once on Sundays.
Only changed files are committed, keeping git history clean and diff-able.
A changelog report is generated for every run showing added/removed memberships.
GitHub Pages auto-deploys within minutes of any data update.

Who is this for?

UN & INGO staff — consistent cross-classification lookups for reporting
Academics & researchers — citable, versioned, machine-readable data
Students — free, open data for projects and dissertations
Data analysts — stable permanent links for Excel, Power BI, Tableau, R, Python