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 nearly 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.

1 History
2 Functions
3 Examples
4 Errors
5 External links

[edit] History

Issue	Entries	Changes
		#	I	+	=	X	Total
2003-1	36,000
2003-2	>36,000
2004-1	>40,000
2004-2	>42,000
2005-1		46	196	2,288	3	16	2,549
2005-2		55	178	929		8	1,170
2006-1	48,553	43	42	3,110		11	3206

Notes: # Spelling and other changes in location names; | Other changes; + Additions to the issue; X Entries marked for deletion in the next issue

[edit] Functions

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

1 = port

2 = rail terminal

3 = road terminal

4 = airport

5 = postal exchange office

[edit] 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

[edit] Errors

From time to time locations are in the list twice. E.g. ARSMC San Miguel de Tucuman (function 23) was added in edition 2006-1, while ARTUC Tucuman (function 1) already was in the list. The coordinates are with very little deviation the same.

In 2006-1 ARSSJ San Salvador de Jujuy was added (4) while ARJUJ Jujuy (1235) already existed.