Add support for continents and their structure

[toadle]

• continents and sub-continents
• Only EN and DE are currently supported locales

[ecbypi]

A few thoughts I wanted to ask about / bring up:

• Why JSON for the territories information? Where does it come from? Is there anyway to store this as YAML the same way we store existing information? I'd prefer not to have to manage two sources of information and formats.
• What's the use-case for this? Not to say there isn't one, more that I want to make sure I understand the problem you're aiming to solve.
• Instead of inserting continents alongside countries, it make more sense to nest countries under the continents they belong to. It's a little weird for Carmen::World to have to look for the Carmen::Continent in order to return its subcontinents.

[toadle]

• The data is based in the UN M49 Territory-Containment (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm) that also the Alpha3-Codes are derived from. The JSON was originally pulled from here: http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/territory_containment_un_m_49.html where they sadly only offer XML (I didn't want to add nokogiri, that is why I used JSON). Of course it could be converted to YAML.
• My use case is a list of data that is geographically organized by country-code (alpha2). Now I have to display this information on a map where you can zoom in, step by step from whole world to country (using https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/geochart).
• I'm not really sure if I get your suggestion correctly: The API is easily changable, but data-loading not so much, since the world-data is structured so differently. BTW: I add the countries-method, since every continent can always list it's countries. Even though it is not "lowest"-level.

[toadle]

@ecbypi I'm happy to change some things, if this functionality is wanted in carmen. Like moving data to YAML and doing some refactoring.

Any feedback from you?

[ecbypi]

Sorry @toadle, it's been a hectic week.

If converting to YAML is possible, that would be great. Additionally, if the contains key could be represented as an array in YAML instead of a space-separated string that we'd have to process at runtime.

Regarding the nesting, I think it might be confusing to have two representations of the world via Carmen::World and Carmen::Continent as well as to groups of nesting that are still connected. It takes some extra time to process how a country is associated with a continent and vice versa when approaching these changes with the existing structure of data carmen uses (one-way nesting). If the information the JSON is built from is available online, it could be used in the update_data.rb script to properly nest the data. This would be a backwards-incompatible change, so we could consider it for v2.0.

I'm all for adding this functionality to the gem and thanks for taking the time to work on it and submit a PR.

[toadle]

I just converted the JSON data to YML, as suggested and removed the world-representation from the regular Continent-API. I would love to have the world only available through Carmen::World but that should be done with changing the data-loading structure. Which BTW is a bit beyond me, cause I don't understand how that is excatly done and IF the territoryContainment should be overridable.

The used source-data btw has recently been made available through a Github-project: https://github.com/unicode-cldr/cldr-core/tree/master/ . Could indeed server as a update_data.rb-source.

Is the plan the somehow merge this before changing the data-structure or what would be the plan?

[toadle]

@ecbypi Do we want to continue this somehow?

[ecbypi]

I do! My schedule with work has been very full for a while now. I'll squeeze in some time this weekend.

[TylerRick]

Does someone want to try to rebase and merge https://github.com/dpaluy/carmen/pull/1 ?

[toadle]

Wow this thing still lives 😇 The project i built it for has since died 😎