UN/LOCODE

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UN/LOCODE is a geographic coding scheme developed and maintained by United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, a unit of the United Nations.

UN/LOCODE assigns more than 50000 code elements to locations with functions such as seaports, airports, rail and road terminals, post offices, border crossing points and other locations used in trade and transport in 234 countries.

UN/LOCODEs typically have five characters. The first two are letters, and come from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes. Normally three letters will follow, but if there are not enough combinations, numbers from 2 to 9 can also be used. For airports, the three letters following the country code are not always identical to the IATA airport code. According to the secretary note for edition 2005-1 [1] 705 location entries show the differing IATA code.

Beside the abbreviation, UN/LOCODE also defines a spelling for each location that can be written without special characters. This is achieved by stripping off the diacritics from the (romanized) local name.

Contents

History

Issue Date Entries Changes
# I + = X Total
2003-1 36,000
2003-2 >36,000
2004-1 >40,000
2004-2 >42,000
2005-1 50,000 46 196 2,288 3 16 2,549
2005-2 55 178 929 8 1,170
Notes
# Spelling and other changes in location names
| Other changes
+ Additions to the issue
X Entries marked for deletion in the next issue

Functions

Each defined functions gets a number; the most important are:

1 = port
2 = rail terminal
3 = road terminal
4 = airport
5 = postal exchange office

Examples

DE BER for Berlin in Germany
DE TXL for Tegel International Airport in Berlin, Germany
FR PAR for Paris, France
GB PAR for Par, United Kingdom (no airport, no IATA)
SE GOT for Gothenburg in Sweden, with stripped spelling Goteborg and the local form Göteborg
US NYC for New York City in the United States

External links

fr:UN/LOCODE sk:UN/LOCODE