The University of Washington Country Code (UWCC) is the authoritative source for all references to country names, abbreviations, and code values for all areas of the University, including UW Medicine, UW Bothell, and UW Tacoma.
The UWCC is based on the US Government’s published Geopolitical Entities Names and Codes (GENC) standards.
Initiative
Prior to 2021, the UW lacked a uniform list of countries from which to perform reporting and data analysis. This caused difficulty in providing consistent data and information across the enterprise and led to calls for a universal standard.
UW Data Governance created a Task Force to make a recommendation for a single, institutional list of countries that can be used for data collection, reporting, and analytics at UW. Its recommendation that UW adopt GENC was approved by the Data Governance Steering and Operational Committee in June 2020.
This initiative, and the standard and supporting resources, will help move the UW from a maturity level of 1 “Initial” to 4 “Managed.”
Standard
The new UWCC standard affirms that the UWCC is based on GENC for country codes and names. See Data Governance Standard for UWCC.
Supporting Resources
The UWCC supporting resources includes:
- Reference data table in the Enterprise Data Warehouse [netid required]
- Country exception report/visualization on the BI (Business Intelligence) Portal [netid required]
- Glossary and definitions in Knowledge Navigator: Country Codes Definitions [netid required]
Institutional Data Steward and Sub Data Domain Steward
UW country codes are part of the Core Data domain. A Country Code Sub-Domain Data Steward will work to steward this core data element in collaboration with the UW Data Governance Operational Committee, the Institutional Data Steward group that stewards the Core Data domain on behalf of the UW.
Task Force
Ex-officio
Ann Nagel, Associate Vice Provost of Privacy | Chair, Data Governance Operational Committee
Members 2019-2020
| Name | Title/Org |
|---|---|
| Bart Pietrzak | Director, UW-IT (University of Washington Information Technology), Task Force Chair |
| Sudha Sharma | Web Developer, Office of Global Affairs |
| Keith Van Eaton | Metadata Manager, UW-IT |
| Justin Williams | Manager of Data Governance, University Advancement |
Contact
For questions about the UW’s Country Code standard, please contact uwcountrynames@uw.edu.