About this tool

What this is

RDS Explorer is a visual front end for the Government of Canada Enterprise Data Reference Standard for countries, territories and geographic areas. It is the authoritative list the GC uses to name and identify places consistently across departments and systems.

The underlying data is public open data published by Global Affairs Canada under the Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada). This explorer simply makes that reference list easier to browse, search and understand.

Key identifiers

Every place in the standard carries two kinds of identifiers. Knowing the difference is the key to reading the data correctly.

• GC_ID — the canonical identifier for an entity (a place). It stays the same even when the place changes its name, status or borders. If you publish or share data, the GC_ID is what lets everyone agree they are talking about the same place over time.
• GC_HIST_ID — one identifier per historical record. Each time a place is created, renamed, or dissolved, a new historical record (and a new GC_HIST_ID) is added under the same GC_ID. The GC_HIST_ID identifies a single snapshot in that history.

In short: one GC_ID per place, many GC_HIST_IDs describing how that place changed over its lifetime. Using the stable GC_ID keeps records linked even after a name change.

Status and type

Each record is tagged with a status and a type.

Status tells you whether a place is current:

• Active — the place currently exists in the standard.
• Inactive — the place no longer exists as defined (for example, it was dissolved or absorbed), but its historical record is kept.

Type classifies what kind of place it is:

• Country — a sovereign state.
• Territory — a dependent or administered territory.
• Geographical Area — a region or grouping that is not a country in its own right.
• Special Cases — entries that do not fit the usual categories.
• Non-Self-Governing Territory — a territory recognized as not yet fully self-governing.

Dates and the timeline

Each historical record has an effective date (when it took effect) and an effective end date (when it stopped applying).

A far-future end date is the convention for “still current” — it means the record has no real end yet and is the place’s present-day definition.

Reading these dates across all of a place’s records reconstructs its history. The Timeline view uses them to show creations (a place first appears), name changes (a new record replaces an earlier one), and dissolutions (a place becomes inactive) over the decades.

How to use this tool

• Dashboard — totals and distributions at a glance: how many entities, how many are active, and the spread of types and statuses.
• Map — see places geographically, with a time slider to view the world as it was in a given period.
• Timeline — scroll through creations, name changes and dissolutions ordered by year.
• Relationships — explore how entities connect: parents, children and jurisdictions.
• Compare — put two or more entities side by side to spot differences.
• Search — jump straight to any place by name or code.