EnvironmentOntology
NTR: 'fifth-order administrative region'
Label: fifth-order administrative region Definition: A subdivision of a fourth-order administrative division.
(This is mentioned in Geonames.)
I am totally unfamiliar with with what the different orders of administrative divisions. Wikipedia wasn't much help describing them either :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisions_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisions_by_country#Administrative_divisions_with_ISO_3166-1
I am curious. Who creates these? What are the used for? It might help to put such information in the comments.
I work on a project that was using NCIT terms for politically defined places like District, Zone, Region, State, Province. One reason this was problematic was that these names have different meanings in different countries. The names "State" and "Province" may have slight differences in meaning , but they are very similar, being primary administrative divisions of a country. It made sense to me to use the n-order administrative region terms since they are defined to be country-agnostic and based on the relationship to the national geopolitical entity. I made this request because we have a 'parish in Uganda' term that falls under a fifth-order administrative division. (We have a 'subcounty of Uganda' term with ENVOs' 'fourth-order administrative region' as parent.)
It is very context specific.
- Many countries 'skip' the state/province layer and go straight to cities.
- Some big cities have a unitary government (Brisbane, New York, Paris) while other big cities do not (Melbourne) (London has flipped and flopped on this).
So there cannot be a strong rule that all levels have to be present and used in sequence, else the mapping from admin region level to vernacular terms must be allowed to be different in different places.
I agree that 'city' should be defined without reference to the 'administrative region' hiearchy, as it currently is in ENVO, because of the examples given by @dr-shorthair, but I still think the 'administrative region' hierarchy is useful for other entities that exist as nth-degree divisions of countries.
