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region – ontology for geographic, geoeconomic, and geopolitical regions
region is a lightweight, standards‑aligned ontology to describe and interlink regional groupings of places, economies, and polities – spanning geographic regions (e.g., Melanesia), geoeconomic blocs (e.g., EU Single Market, ASEAN), and geopolitical alliances (e.g. NATO, PIF). It provides stable identifiers, a small but expressive core vocabulary, and interoperable mappings to ISO standards and widely used knowledge graphs.
Designed for analysts, data engineers, and researchers who need clean, canonical concepts for “regions” that are not countries but are also not vague text labels.
Why?
The ontology became necessary mainly because of
- Ambiguity: “Europe”, “EU”, “EEA”, “Eurozone” are often conflated, yet they refer to different membership sets and legal scopes.
- Volatility: Alliances evolve, references might or might not – accessions, suspensions, observer statuses.
- Interoperability: Regions should connect seamlessly to countries (ISO‑3166), currencies (ISO‑4217), languages (ISO‑639), and other authoritative references.
- Reusability: A consistent model enables reuse across trade analytics, sanctions monitoring, supply‑chain risk, climate and fisheries governance, and policy research.
Where?
The official github repository contains the published ontology.
For ease of access the latest versions of the taxonomy can be downloaded here:
Alignments can be obtained here:
An inverted view of associations: