What is the Country Borders data

What is the Country Borders data

A border is a line either in real or artificial that splits up the geographical areas. Borders are the political boundaries that separate countries, regions, cities and towns. A border outlines the area that is controlled by a specific governing body and only the government of the area can generate and impose laws within its borders.

GeoDataSource Country Borders is a free data that provides you with a complete list of countries and the associated land border countries also known as the neighboring countries. The data comes in the form of the CSV format which you can easily import into any relational database for query. Furthermore, this data use ISO3166-1 for the country code thus allowing you to retrieve and use the information with ease.

Example of Country Borders

From the below table, we know that France and Spain share borders with Andorra.

country_codecountry_namecountry_border_codecountry_border_name
ADAndorraFRFrance
ADAndorraESSpain

Data Fields

Below are the data fields for the Country Borders database.

Field NameDescription
country_codeTwo-character country code based on ISO 3166.
country_nameName of country.
country_border_codeTwo-character country code based on ISO 3166.
country_border_nameName of country border.

Data Table

In order to get the Country Borders information, the country_borders table can be created and loaded by the following code in MySQL.

-- Create table "country_borders"
CREATE TABLE `country_borders`(
	`country_code` VARCHAR(2),
	`country_name` VARCHAR(100),
	`country_border_code` VARCHAR(2),
	`country_border_name` VARCHAR(100),
	PRIMARY KEY (`country_code`, `country_border_code`),
	INDEX `idx_country_code` (`country_code`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;

-- Load data into table
LOAD DATA LOCAL
INFILE 'GEODATASOURCE-COUNTRY-BORDERS.CSV'
INTO TABLE `country_borders`
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n'
IGNORE 1 LINES;

Licensing

The Country Borders data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is free for personal or commercial use with attribution required by mentioning the use of this data as follows,
This site or product includes Country Borders data available from https://www.geodatasource.com.

For more details about the Country Borders databases, you can visit https://www.geodatasource.com/addon/country-borders to learn more about the information provided.

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