Geography

Definition

Geographical Areas classified within the Taxonomy.

Description

The database contains a four-level taxonomy of geographical areas. Like the occupation and skill taxonomy, the concepts are related to each other in a hierarchical structure:

graph TD;
A --narrower--> B
B --narrower--> C
C --narrower--> D
    A("continent")
    B("country")
    C("region")
    D(municipality)

Continents

The top geographic type lists all continents in the world, including Antarctica. The taxonomy is based on the UN standard for continents. Classified with this type, there is also the concept Hela världen (this concept pragmatically targets some use case within Arbetsförmedlingen).

Countries

The second type in this taxonomy contains all countries, according to ISO standard for countries. Each country in this level has a parent continent in the top level.

Regions

The third type is simply called region and contains all regions within the EU with a “NUTS code” (See Eurostat for information about NUTS). In Sweden the regions correspond to “län”. Every region is mapped to a specific parent country in the second level in the taxonomy.

Please note that there are two versions of the NUTS level three attribute within the Taxonomy: nuts_level_3_code_2013 and nuts_level_3_code_2021. Here, the latter one is recommended since some regions have been updated since the previous version.

Municipalities

The fourth type of the geographic areas contains the Swedish municipalities. Each municipality is mapped to a specific parent region in the above level.

Note that this level is not applicable on areas outside of Sweden.

Regarding Swedish areas

When querying for regions and municipalities in Sweden, the concept-id for Sweden, i46j_HmG_v64, needs to be specified at the top level. From there, you can make use of the geographical hierarchy to include the related regions and municipalities. See the GraphQL-example below.

Please note that there are two attributes concerning region specific codes for these regions: nuts_level_3_code_2021, adhering to the EU-standard and national_nuts_level_3_code_2019, specifying the Swedish "länskod". The Swedish "kommunkod" is found through the lau_2_code_2015 attribute.

GraphQL examples

The queries below can be tested through our GraphiQL interface.

Get all continents and countries

query MyQuery {
  concepts(type: "continent") {
    id
    preferred_label
    definition
    type
    narrower (type: "country"){
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      iso_3166_1_alpha_2_2013
      iso_3166_1_alpha_3_2013
    }
  }
}

Get all EU-regions

query MyQuery {
  concepts(id: "HstV_nCB_W2i") {
    id
    preferred_label
    definition
    type
    narrower (type: "country"){
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      iso_3166_1_alpha_2_2013
      iso_3166_1_alpha_3_2013
    }
  }
}

Get all Swedish municipalities

query MyQuery {
  concepts(id: "i46j_HmG_v64") {
    id
    preferred_label
    definition
    type
    iso_3166_1_alpha_2_2013
    iso_3166_1_alpha_3_2013
    narrower (type: "region"){
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      nuts_level_3_code_2021
      national_nuts_level_3_code_2019
      narrower(type: "municipality") {
        id
        preferred_label
        type
        lau_2_code_2015
      }
    }
  }
}